Cat Apples
Posted in Pets on 12/28/2011 06:36 pm by admin
Foreign Countries Cash In On Obscure Domain Extensions (fastcompany)
Those cool, short domain names can come with a catch: crazy global dictators.
Illustration by John Hersey
**”I wish I had** cheeseburger,” sighs Ben Huh, sounding very much like a cat
his company would LOLify. But right now, the Cheezburger Network CEO–whose
empire includes the photo blogs “I Can Haz Cheezburger?” and “So Much Pun”–
isn’t talking about cheeseburger, the food. He’s craving cheezburg.er, the
website, which is considerably tougher to order.
That’s because all .er domains are owned by Eritrea, a tiny nation in Eastern
Africa. Its totalitarian government won’t register them to outsiders, refusing
to cash in on the popular English-language suffix. “There have been
discussions about changing this policy. No decision has yet been reached,” is
all its self-described “technical contact” will say. So it’s no cheezburg.er
for Huh, and nothing better–or bett.er–for anyone else.
Such is the mad, messy, burgeoning business of “domain hacking,” the catchall
term for when companies buy special extensions, like .do and .mp, to create
distinctive web addresses like cre.do and chi.mp. Benefits abound. Domain
hacks tend to be short and easy to share on social-media sites. The obscure
extensions aren’t typically as booked up, or expensive, as dotcoms …
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