Give me back my name
June 18, 2026
You probably don’t think about domain names very much. They’re mundane and just there until you need them. If you’ve forgotten what a domain name is, it’s the URL you used to reach this website. Let me tell you about my recent experience with securing my domain name.
Oddly coincidental that this happened in the same month that Tim Berners-Lee (the British computer scientist best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web, HTML, the URL system, and HTTP) celebrated his 71st birthday. Happy Birthday, Sir Tim.
Full disclosure, my previous blog website had my name with a .org Top Level Domain, which I had for about two years. But domain name ownership is like any other contract, and it was about to expire. The .org TLD stands for “organization" which is typically used by nonprofits, charities, or open-source projects. Not exactly the ideal fit for my website. I’d had my Visual CV for more than a decade. It was a nice site but, well, flat. Once a friend showed me some AI-powered capabilities of newer platforms, I was hooked. So I made a business decision to incorporate my blog site with my Visual CV with a contact form into a single site. Having worked on websites on the Squarespace platform for about a year, I was accustomed to how their sites operated and the price was right. So that site was launched with a placeholder name.
Once a company gains possession of a domain name, they tend to hold on tightly. Nobody gives up without a fight. Back to Tim Berners-Lee. When I worked for a company named HGS (an outsourcing firm that was part of a $55 billion global conglomerate), the domain name HGS.com was owned by a prep school in England. Turns out Sir Tim went there, and they were one of the first domain names ever assigned. Highly unlikely that they’d give it up to anyone, and to date they haven’t. HGS went with TeamHGS.com, or as I used to nickname it, Team Hugs. A customer care company giving hugs. Awww, isn’t that cute?
The early days of the internet were a lot like the Oklahoma Land Rush of the early Twentieth Century. Everybody charged in at once and claimed their turf. An enterprising person approached the domain name registrar and bought up the domain names of celebrities, with the goal of selling it back to them at a substantial premium. One such celebrity was Bruce Springsteen. Bruce fought for years at a cost of millions (there was an undisclosed settlement) to get the internet domain of his name. He wrote about this in his autobiography. Imagine having to pay to get your own name back? Yeah, Bruce, I can.
My previous blog website was built on the Wordpress platform. It was constantly getting hacked and brought down. It was embarrassing to point to it in interviews only to find bizarre Eastern European writing on what was supposed to be my website. I’d hired a company to help manage it, which was a money pit. It seems they were always asking for $600 here, $600 there, and everywhere to put blowout patches on the site.
Once the Squarespace site was ready, I asked them to transfer my domain name to the new site. A barrage of angry emails, texts, and voicemail messages ensued. Their response was they wouldn’t do it until the name expired, then charge me $1,000 to get my name back. Then transfer the name to me at an additional cost of $100. Fortunately, I didn’t have to deal with them any longer. I temporarily let the name expire. My name with a more appropriate .net extension was an available domain name, which now points to this website.
Yes, David Byrne, names do make all the difference in the world.
