The New Royalty

[This is a piece I’ve had sitting around for a while. Dan Gillmor’s piece on Google’s effects on domains (blogged by Dave) called it to mind…]

The year is 2090. It’s 60 years since Arnold Schwarzenegger cinched his support belt one notch tigher, added 50 pounds to the barbell, pushed up … and exploded, spewing formaldehyde and Viagra all over the Hollywood Gym. His site, www.schwarzenegger.com, has been maintained by his estate ever since. There hasn’t been any new content added since the year 2047 and it’s now mainly consulted by historians studying Arnhold’s role in the Richard Simmons presidency. But now Arnold’s estranged great-granddaughter has filed suit with 65 other of Arnold’s descendants who feel they have a legitimate claim on schwarzenegger.com. The movement spreads among the progeny of other first generation web site name grabbers. “No Dots for the Dead!” becomes an international rallying cry. Their opponents begin to sport bumperstickers that say “Sure you can have my dot-com name…when you pry it from my cold dead fingers” on their levitating personal scooters … because, um, Flubber turned out to be real.

I’m facing a version of this problem right now. I own www.weinberger.org. (Weinberger.com was taken by a company that mass-registers surnames.) There are lots of other Weinbergers in the world: If I use Google to look for myself, I find a rabbi in Israel, a car dealer in California, and a kid who writes record reviews, all on the first page of the results. So, as the sole owner of weinberger.org, when I’m dead and gone, which of my kids should I leave the Weinberger family org to, assuming I agree to be an “org donor.” And which of their kids, lo unto the many generations will inherit weinberger.org… and which ones will be frozen out? And how about the poor car dealer’s kids who’ll never have a chance at inheriting their-name.org?

This question has been resolved in a hardheaded way in the business world. American Airlines owns aa.com, but everyone from Alcoholics Anonymous to Aukland Adventures would probably like to own it. The victory goes to the person who applied earliest or can afford to buy it from the person who did … with trademark-owners trumping everyone. So what do the losers do? They register a lame variant such as “aa-Aukland.com” or “alcoholics- anonymous.org” that you might guess at after five wrong tries.

And adding new extensions besides .com and .org and the others doesn’t really help. The fact is that there are lots more people than meaningful web site names, and it’s only going to get worse as the generations increase.

So, the vast majority of us are going to be left out in the cold. You’ll locate our sites by looking up our name on some web directory. On the other hand, those of us who grabbed our names early, we’re going to the new royalty. “Hello, I’m David Weinberger … of the .org weinbergers.” Ah, it’s gonna be sweet.

Categories: Uncategorized dw