Dot-Com: The Real Thing

Tonight on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, one of the questions referenced the 2007 domain-name dispute over the website, keithurban.com. In that suit, Keith Urban, the Australian country singer/artist sued Keith Urban, a New Jersey artist/painter, over the domain name. It seems that the artist had registered his dot-com long before the musician became famous in the U.S. Although the musician claimed that the painter was trying to misrepresent himself, the painter did not claim to be a musician, did not use photographs of the musician, did not sell music. There seemed to be no cause for confusion, except that both men shared the same name. Certainly, in my opinion, the musician didn't have a leg to stand on, and I hoped that the law saw it the same way. I was curious to see how the case came out. I decided to Google-search the final decision, but could not find it (though I found multiple references to the original case and a followup countersuit). Finally, it occurred to me just to visit the website and see whether it touted art or music. As of June 29, 2010, it still belongs to the painter, Keith Urban ~ not the musician. As a matter of fact, the lawsuit has probably brought the painter some success. The current site design is more professional and polished than the original site. It is obvious at first glance that the site belongs to an artist. It's not even necessary to read the text. The lack of any reference to a legal conclusion of this case makes me think that it might still be in arbitration. Or maybe no reporter ever dug deeper than the original AP release. Obviously, I hope that the website remains as it is: registered to the painter, Keith Urban of New Jersey. Keith Urban, the musician, simply lost out. I guess he should've claimed fame before 1999 (when the dot-com was registered). It all goes to show how important the choice of a domain name can be.

Bought and Paid For

So, now I was the proud owner of a web site. Not a free website, this time, but one that was bought and paid for, with real money ~ not that Monopoly stuff. I think the true horror of what I'd done dawned on me as soon as the cash left my bank account. In for a penny, in for a pound, as they say. I'd just forked over a week's pay, and for what? A blank, no-name website that I myself was going to have to build... brick by brick (or bracket by bracket, as the case may be). Talk about Frankenstein! Bugbones, indeed. I barely knew how to put two angle brackets together. And now I had a new dilemma... should I stick with my odd name? I loved my little Bugbones cartoon guy... but was he truly representative of me? Did I want him buzzing about my serious art? This was going to be my real site, my one true dot-com. I hadn't even bought my name yet, and here I had a web site, just wasting away. So much for fear of technology... my technological clock was ticking!

Choosing a Host: Let's Get Cheap

I know why I avoided Network Solutions' hosting: the price. I have no idea why I chose to bypass OCS, my local ISP, and go after another host. Perhaps OCS wouldn't let me have my own domain on their free hosting plan. Perhaps they were already having business problems by then. OCS aside, I know exactly why I picked Icom. They were the cheapest package I found that published their ad in English. There may have been one cheaper, but it had the look of a man standing on a street corner in a trenchcoat. Wanna buy a watch? It's cheap. So... on February 19th, 2000, I signed up with Icom. It was to cost $49 for setup and $99 per year in hosting fees. Not long later, they sent me my temporary URL. I was now the proud owner of a site that said, "Under Construction." Now all I had to do was buy my domain name and point it. Icom sent me instructions on how to do this. These were something like stereo instructions (shades of Beetlejuice).

Network Solutions: The Dot-Com People

In searching InterNIC, all roads led to Rome, or in this case, to Network Solutions. Network Solutions billed themselves as "the dot-com people." Apparently whatever InterNIC was, it was owned or controlled by Network Solutions, and any fee that I would have to pay must go into their coffers. If Network Solutions' hosting package was any indication of what InterNIC fees would be, I was in for an expensive ride. Their hosting package was about $300 a year, as I recall. Maybe more. And they didn't speak of web space in terms of megabytes or gigabytes, but of pages. For $300 you got a page. If you needed more pages, you bought more. A one-page site for 300 bucks. That's the way I read it. And here I was used to Angelfire, where you could have as many pages as you could build. I could tell by their terms that hosting was one thing and registration was another. I still don't know if my perception about Network Solutions' hosting package was wrong. Maybe by "page" they meant "site." Even so, their package was high.

Who is InterNIC?

I had pretty well decided to have my dot-com, but now came the struggle to understand just what that entailed. There were several entities involved in domain purchase and maintenance, and the services each one offered weren't clear to me. One odd sticking point was "InterNIC fees." No matter who you chose as a registrar, and where you decided to park... no matter who hosted your page... YOU, the domain owner (said the fine print), were responsible for InterNIC fees. Who or what was InterNIC? And how much were these mysterious fees? No-one knew. I tore up the keyboard searching the 'Net for "InterNIC." The more I searched, the less I found ~ and the more confused I became. InterNIC fees began to loom as the strange, unknown quantity. Would these fees break me? Were we talking a dollar a year or fifty dollars a month? With Internet, it could be anything. There just wasn't any frame of reference. Common sense finally prevailed, and I decided that the "fee" was probably a nominal amount, like a tax.