How Vice Finally Got Vice.com

Vice.com, the parent site of Motherboard’s parent company, officially launches today. Getting there took countless hours of taurine-fueled coding, chaotic meetings, and one weathered domain lawyer who was hired by Vice to get the domain it always wanted but couldn’t, because it was being used as a porn site or something to that effect. Ari Goldberger got his start in “domain law” in the 1990s after he launched ESQwire.com, a name that played on the words "esquire" and being "wired" to the internet. Hearst Corporation, which owns Esquire (but not Wired), sued him in a landmark case. He won and became the go-to guy for domain litigation. “Back then you had to explain what the internet was to judges,” he told Vice editor Rocco Castoro.

I'm looking at the archive from May 8, 1999. Clicking the link sent me to justwild.com, which features a photo of a woman with what appears to be a zucchini in her vagina. It could be a cucumber, though. Hard to tell. This was some sort of bonanza period for these type of sites, right?
My understanding is that the adult industry was doing very, very well in '99. Companies were paying top dollar for traffic. By 2004 or 2005, however, adult revenue had declined, partly due to higher credit-card fees for chargebacks and a crackdown on abuse. Chargebacks became a big issue and had a negative impact. Imagine there's a $35 charge from a porn site on someone's credit-card statement and his wife would say, "Honey, did you do this?" And he'd reply, "No, that's crazy!" Then the wife would call the card company to chargeback the site, which can't be disputed because at that point it's considered fraud. Looking at the Way Back Machine, you can see the domain was subsequently pointed to Yahoo, which displays pay-per-click links on the site and shared the revenue with the owner. Have your clients or legal opponents ever tried to play games with you? Like registering domains that contain your name and some creative descriptors?
There was an individual named "Ryan" who wanted to buy ryan.com from my client. A few months later, I decided that I had procrastinated in getting arigoldberger.com for too long. But when I typed my name in to see if it was available, up loaded a picture of three naked fat women, and it said, "Welcome to my site. Check out my girls." I looked up who owned it and it was the guy who wanted to buy ryan.com. I called him up and said, "Really funny, but can I have my name back?" We worked it out.

Read more at Viceland — I mean, Vice.com.