Born on the 4th of July! .US Gets Its Own News & Information Website – American Domain Names at ADN.US

Born
on the 4th of July! .US Gets Its
Own News
& Information Website –
American Domain Names at ADN.US

I’ve
been in the domain business
for almost 20 years now but I
never would have discovered it
if it weren’t for a single
magazine ad I saw back in the spring
of 2002. The Internet and CD
burning had killed my previous
business – a string of record and
CD stores in Florida – so I was
trying to figure out what to do
next when the latest copy of PC
World magazine arrived in
my mailbox (computers had
dramatically improved every part
of my personal and business life
by then and I had started building
my own PCs). 

I
opened the front cover and saw a
full page ad placed by the  .US
domain registry (operated by Neustar
at that time) announcing that, for
the first time since .US
was created in 1985 it was
being opened up to all U.S.
citizens and others who do
business in the U.S. Prior to April
24, 2002, the TLD was reserved
for use by government agencies,
schools and a few other special
uses.

I
had only one domain  at the
time, the one I had built a
website for music business on at MusicParadise.com
in 1997. MY stores were
actually named Rock Island
but RockIsland.com was already
taken, even back then. So when I
saw the .US ad, even though

 May
2002 edition of PC World magazine

I
didn’t know what I would do next, I decided I should register a few
in areas I had the most experience in, media and music. 

In
the course of researching business ideas and relevant domains I stumbled
upon a link to DNForum.com where most of the domain investors of that
era hung out. I was astonished to learn people were buying and selling
domain names alone. I thought domains only had value if something was
built on them! It was a revelation that set off a chain of events
that continues to this day. I started buying names in .com. .org and .us,
with far more purchased for investment rather than development. That led to
founding DNJournal on New Year’s Day 2003 because I couldn’t find a
trade magazine about an industry I was rapidly falling in love with. That
led to what has been an amazing two-decade run that has taken me all
over the world and given me the opportunity to meet hundreds of remarkable
people that I never would have met otherwise.

(Posted
July 4, 2021)

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