Auctioning Internet Domain Names the Old-fashioned Way

Today in The Atlantic, the story of Rolf Larsen, one of the few people to own “an entire top-level domain.” He’s in charge of .global, and he’s auctioning off the domain names in hotel ballrooms with the help of celebrity auctioneer Charles Hanson.

Here’s what Atlantic writer Leo Mirani has to say about Hanson:

A minor celebrity, he has previously auctioned Queen Victoria’s underpants for $9,000, and, in 2012, a piece of toast from the wedding of Prince Charles and Princess Diana in 1981. “We’re on the runway. Let’s open up and let’s lift off,” he beseeched the crowd as he pitched flights.global, which sold for $5,000.

People are seriously flying from around the world to get a piece of that dot-global action. For the rest of us, we can take heart in the fact that people don’t really type URLs into address bars anymore; we just type the name of the business or website we want to visit and let the browser take care of it for us — or we navigate the internet through apps. Knowing a website’s URL is a bit like knowing someone’s phone number; useful, maybe, but kind of outdated.

Photo: Terry Johnston

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