Dunkindonuts.org

» see dunkindonuts.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

In 1998 the thing standing between me and a domain name was paperwork. The Turkish registry ran out of a university in Ankara, and an address under.com.tr wanted documents showing you had some claim to the name you were asking for. Registering a large company's trademark in order to complain about that company was not a request the system would have processed. What David Felton did in 1997 needed a namespace where nobody checked, and.org in the late nineties was exactly that.

Felton was twenty-five and taught school in Hamden, Connecticut. The grievance that started it was small enough to be funny: the Dunkin' Donuts stores around Hartford did not carry one percent milk. He registered dunkindonuts.org and opened it to everybody else who had something to say about the chain. Customers wrote in. Employees wrote in too, which is the part that made it dangerous.

The page still sitting in the archive from November 1998 is a frameset with the title "What's with Dunkin Donuts???" and a description line calling itself a site dedicated to consumer opinions about Dunkin Donuts. The keyword list includes coolatta, which tells you the author knew precisely whose search traffic he was standing in front of. It worked. On some search engines the.org came up above the company's own address.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the letter ~

In July 1998 Dunkin' Donuts sent Felton a cease and desist. This was the standard move of the period and it usually worked, because the people running these sites were individuals with no lawyer and a day job. Felton's answer was to tell the company it could buy the domain from him.

That reply is the whole hinge of the story. He was not claiming a right to the trademark, he was pointing out that he held the registration and they did not, and that the registration was the only thing either of them was actually arguing about. Negotiations opened at $1,070.

~ the price ~

The transfer went through in August 1999. The final figure was never disclosed, only the number the talking started at. The company pointed the.org at its own site and the complaints stopped being reachable at an address that carried the brand name.

The company had also, during the two years the site was up, added items to menus and mailed coupons to people who had posted there. Both of those things are in the record and both can be read either as a chain listening to its customers or as a chain managing a public relations problem it did not control. There is no reason it cannot be both.

~ what it settled ~

The month Felton handed over the domain is also the month ICANN approved the Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy. From the end of 1999 onward a trademark holder had a cheap administrative route to take a domain back, and paying an individual for one became a choice rather than the only option. Whatever leverage a schoolteacher had in July 1998 was gone within eighteen months.

What replaced it was the suffix. Sucks-domains, protest pages at addresses that made no claim to be official. Courts in the United States generally protected those because nobody was confused about who was speaking. That distinction only exists because a batch of cases like this one forced somebody to draw it.

The domain does not resolve today. Not a redirect, not a parking page. Whoever last renewed dunkindonuts.org let it go, and the address that once ranked above a national coffee chain now returns nothing at all.

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