Isn’t this a very common phrase? Surely, someone already thought about this?
Money.
The same way they got “meta”: money.
Considering it was registered in 1995 (https://www.whois.com/whois/threads.com) you are correct in thinking that it should have already been registered.
However you can sell (transfer) a domain to others if you wish, which is probably what meta did.
You just know someone bought that domain hoping to turn it into a gangbusters online clothes retailer and the best they could manage to do is camp on it and sell it.
Could’ve been Bezos, instead was a bozo.
Were they a bozo, though? If they sold that domain to FB, there is a great chance they just banked like gangbusters.
I suppose it depends on your outlook. I’d rather have had the passive income over time paid in stock options that multiply in value that I can get interest free loans against to file tax losses than the one time payout you have to pay gains on.
Hindsight is 20/20
Edit to add: there’s also a non zero chance that Meta swooped in like Disney did to Central Florida, set up a secret shell company to buy the property under value so no one knows what big business is behind the acquisition.
Honestly, chances are godaddy sold it to them for a few hundred bucks.
If you’re interested, you can see the past snapshots of thread.net in the wayback machine. This one from 2016: https://web.archive.org/web/20160111175229/http://thread.net/
Old primary word domains like this can cost millions to acquire.
Isn’t this something else though? Meta’s is .net isn’t it? So even they couldn’t get the .com…
edit: Indeed it’s nothing to do with Meta, though it seems kinda related. Bit surprised Meta went with the name actually.
ah ye are right, I briefly checked out .com and it seemed to roughly match
.net was registered in 1997 so the same roughly still applies
Yeah, and if they could stop using established terms for their BS like “Metaverse” that would be great.
How does Microsoft justify having apps called “Teams” and “Code”?
Meta is a stupid name. So is threads.
It seems that before Instagram’s Threads was launched, threads.net was just a domain name parked for sale with GoDaddy’s domain auction service Afternic: https://web.archive.org/web/20221115220239/http://threads.net/
So I guess Meta just paid whatever they were asking to be paid?
At least they’re willing to use their buttload of money acquire the domain, unlike Nissan and what they did to nissan.com owner.
Could you elaborate, please?
Nissan Motors v. Nissan Computer
In 1980, Uzi Nissan founded Nissan Foreign Car, an automobile service, in Raleigh, North Carolina.[9][10] In 1987, Uzi Nissan founded Nissan International, Ltd, an import/export company that traded primarily in heavy equipment and computers.[11] On 14 May 1991, Uzi Nissan founded Nissan Computer Corporation, which provides sales and service of personal computers, servers, and computer parts, as well as internet hosting and development. Nissan Computer registered nissan.com for its use on 4 June 1994, five years prior to Nissan Motor Corporation’s interest in the domain.[10][2]
Nissan Motors considered Nissan Computer’s use of the name to be trademark dilution, and laid claim to the domain by alleging cyber squatting. However, Nissan Computer was named after its owner, Uzi Nissan.[13][14][15] Following the outcome of the case, Nissan Motors uses the name nissanusa.com for its U.S. website.
Uzi Nissan died in 2020 due to covid and the website is now no more, but it used to contains his account abut Nissan suing him for the domain and he spent years and about a million dollar to defend himself. He won and Nissan was ordered to pay $50,000 for his trouble, so he was furious. More details can be found in the internet archive snapshot: https://web.archive.org/web/20190608101443/https://www.digest.com/Big_Story.php
Interesting
Why the hell washe not awarded his whole fees? Maybe the jury didn’t think he’d been spending that much money? Well what an annoying outcome.
I don’t understand something else - why every article say that threads us a Twitter rival if meta themselves say it’s a slack competitor and it’s an exact copy of slack
Edit: oh OK that’s what op was talking about. Turns out there’s already an app called thread which is slack copycat and was created before meta’s threads lmao what a shitshow
They just have the .net though.
Yeah, and if they could stop using established terms for their BS like “Metaverse” that would be great.
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