Angel thinks I won’t get an iota of remorse out of Perkins. When she says it, I feel so silly for fantasizing that I might get it that I deny I want it and then feel bad all over again for denying it. Maybe I really do need to talk this out. So I ask around, trying to find more people who have had this happen to them, a makeshift support group for the domainishly challenged. A few friends have had to pay a hundred dollars for a lost domain here and there. Speeding ticket money. Nothing to write home about. Except for my friend Kenji Bunch. Kenji is a violist in Portland, Oregon. He is in possession of all his credit cards, but his descent into the underbelly of the Internet began with him switching contact e-mails and forgetting to inform his registrar. Before he knew it, his name was sold at auction to a Chinese domainer named Heng Zhong.
“I guess I could have just switched to dot-org but dot-org felt a little grandiose. Like I’m on a mission to help all the Kenji Bunches in the world. I felt like my best shot was to try to appeal to this guy’s humanity.”
Kenji forwards me his eloquent plea to Heng Zhong, who suggests $5,000 as an appropriate bounty. Like Perkins, Zhong refers to his “business” and to Kenji as someone who has willingly entered this exchange. I’ve noticed domainers often speak of “transactions” made and “deals” closed. This would be as adorable as a child pretending to have a tea party if the tea weren’t laced with arsenic. By Zhong’s logic, Kenji is at fault not only for letting his domain lapse but for undervaluing it with a low bid. Zhong also accuses him of having a “bad personality” and “something wrong with his brain.” Though this is somewhat understandable, given Kenji’s assertion that he’s renamed himself Heng Zhong and gone ahead and registered www.TheOtherHengZhongIsABottomFeedingLowlifeScumLeadingAnEmptyExistence.com.
Kenji suggests I speak to his friend, Daniel Feldeson, a Brooklyn-based composer, who’s had a similar experience. The Internet is littered with all kinds of domain horror stories but a healthy amount of them come from singers and guitarists. I am starting to wonder if musicians are somehow even worse at holding down their domains than authors, but this feels like rubbing salt in the wound.
“I was righteously indignant and deeply annoyed,” Daniel says, “just like you.”
Well, almost. The difference between Angel and Kenji and me and Daniel is that Daniel doesn’t feel this way toward the stranger who demanded $2,000 for his site—but toward GoDaddy.
“I felt like the company had done me this incredible disservice. It felt weird to sell my domain to a pirate when there’s really nobody else in the world who’d want it. It’s insane. There must be a better way.”
There’s not. I understand Daniel’s feelings, as they are my feelings. If Wesley Perkins can find me, why can’t my provider find me first? But barring global regulation of over 64 million sites, GoDaddy’s hands are tied. For one thing, their system works like a giant pawnshop. It’s uninterested in the origin story of that bloody Rolex. It can’t parse the difference between an available domain and a lost domain. For another, they are only complicit inasmuch as they have a department devoted to solving the problem. Companies like GoDaddy scale by removing human interaction, and, as Adam told me, the performance evaluations of the brokerage staff are based on their closure rate. The commission exists because, even if you’re in the right, someone has to come in to work and deal with you.
For now, the company has what it refers to as a “grace period.” This is the five stages it takes for your domain to die. While you’re walking around with this symptom-free but fatal disease, this is what’s happening: Between day one and day eighteen of expiration, everything can be reverted back to you without penalty. On day nineteen, your site is technically yours but only for an eighty-dollar redemption fee. A week later, your domain is officially put up for auction. This sounds dire, but you can still get it back, it’s just that now you’ve got a price sticker on your forehead. Ten days after that is when things get messy. The domain is listed in a closeout auction, at which point you have a forty-eight-hour window to reclaim your domain, regardless of the winning bid. That is, assuming you magically decided to stop ignoring six weeks of e-mails. But who among us swings by the emergency room for the heck of it? So now you’re dead, having graduated from purgatory to the aftermarket. And it is here all manner of ghouls await you.
* * *
Sixteen hours before we’re supposed to meet, Perkins pulls the plug. It’s unclear if he’s joking, but I did not fly 3,500 miles to eat a scone and go home. Not wanting him to know where I’m staying, I call him from my cell phone, which leads him to believe that I couldn’t possibly be in London. Once assured that I am, he expresses newfound concern that if I write about this, he will not be “painted in a positive light.” This, despite weeks of claiming he has never and will never care what people think of him. His concerns are not unfounded. But I tell him if he’s worried his job description will reflect poorly on him, he has bigger problems than me. I’m simply curious to know who he is and why he does this. Which, as it turns out, is the truth.
Perkins has begun exhibiting curious signs of humanity. He’s told me the story of the single mother who once called him, sobbing and destitute, so he gave her back her site on
