Just as I Suspected, Someone Else is the Master of My Domain

While drinking beer in the garage, sometimes it’s fun to take your wife’s words out of context and add, “dot com” to the end of them. For example, “This garage smells like an adolescent cliché dot com,” or “The waiter was really pushing the sausage last night dot com.” Yes, it is juvenile.

Anyway … I could probably buy any one of these for her, you know for an anniversary present; but who am I buying it from? Does GoDaddy.com own every combination of words or random letters and numbers that I can come up with? Fortunately, I have an intern, who needs workplace hours.

According to Intern Ben, if you were to going to purchase www.wipethelipstickoffthatmonkey.com prior to 1998, you would have had to do so through the United States Department of Defense. Great. Why was I not surprised? They, apparently, contracted it out to the University of Southern California’s Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). It’s a little Big Brother-esque, but after I let that information marinade for a bit, it’s pretty funny. I like that somewhere the government has paperwork from its sale of www.hotdogsmakemehappy.com.

These days the United States Department of Commerce runs IANA through a non-profit called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). Not as ominous, I guess. Is the Internet expensive to run? Are there Best Buy Geek Squad astronauts working on a satellite? Maybe they’re in an underwater lab. Also, where do the funds from the sale of www.sasquatchesinhighheels.org go? If it’s going to build androids I’m gonna write a letter! This is just how it started in the Terminator.

Well, it looks like I just found a new project for the intern to research. Ben might just get the hours he needs to graduate after all. He’s kind of desperate … dot com.

YOU CLICKED ON THE LINKS, DIDN’T YOU? WEIRDO.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 28th, 2010 at 8:40 pm.

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