By Joshua Quittner
October 1994
I’m waiting for a call back from McDonald’s, the hamburger people. They’re trying to find me someone – anyone – within corporate headquarters who knows what the Internet is and can tell me why there are no Golden Arches on the information highway.
It’s true: there is no mcdonalds.com on the Internet. No burger_king.com either.
Yet.
“Are you finding that the Internet is a big thing?” asked Jane Hulbert, a helpful McDonald’s media-relations person, with whom I spoke a short while ago.
Yes, I told her. In some quarters, the Internet is a very big thing.
I explained a little bit about what the Big Thing is, and how it works, and about the Net Name Gold Rush that’s going on. I told her how important domain names are on the Internet (“Kind of like a phone number. It’s where you get your e-mail. It’s part of your address.”), and I explained that savvy business folks are racing out and registering any domain name they can think of: their own company names, obviously, and generic names like drugs.com and sex.com, and silly names that might have some kind of speculative value one day, like roadkill.com.
“Some companies,” I told Jane Hulbert, “are even registering the names of their competitors.”
“You’re kidding,” she said.
. . .
Which made me think of Jane Hulbert, at McDonald’s. I called her again and we finally connected.
She was very apologetic. “I don’t have anything for you, and I probably won’t have anything for you,” she confessed. “I’ve left a lot of voicemail for people, but no one seems to know anything about it.”
Jane Hulbert said she’d keep checking around, but she didn’t seem hopeful that we could get to the bottom of this domain-name thing. “You’ll probably just have to do your story without it,” she said. “It probably won’t be the end of the world.”
She’s probably right. I wondered how long it would take 2.5 InterNIC people to process my application for mcdonalds.com.
Not very, it turns out. About two weeks later, after filling out the Net-available domain-name application form, I got e-mail notification from domreg@internic.net:
“Registration for the domain MCDONALDS .COM has been completed. The InterNIC database has been updated…. The new information will not be visible via WHOIS until the next business day….”
My fingers trembled, as if ripping open a Big Mac. I checked:
$whois mcdonalds.com Domain Name: MCDONALDS.COM Administrative Contact: Quittner, Josh quit@newsday.com
Oh, that’s McCool. I feel like McPrometheus. I have stolen McFire.
