...and that's when a domain cost $9, now when they went from free to $100 in 1996, the ratio of administrative cost to actual operating costs, becasue of two folks manually processing checks in a limestone cave at NSI and they were blameless theri hand being forced by an endless litany of Orwellian doubletalk.
That was literally the reason they cost money at all.
And the worst part is, it's all the same bad actor. If you take him out, it looks like this:
nsi -> $
We can't those bastards making money on the internet can we?
Same actor set the price though, without notice or appeal which effectively taxed the currency of the internet: domain names and ip adddesses.
The result? As one of the two guys that invented the spreadsheet said "icann was a tax grab that 404'd half the net".
This sounds trivial, who cares about a bunch of dumb old crap ansd that's pretty mich what they said about the stuff lying around after the US Constitution was signed. We have museumsa for that stuff.
Reason being a substantial amount of documentation for the previoius few times this happened is buried in that half century of digital rubble, and there have been many attempts.
The internet community was perhaps more acutely aware
of this, at the time a vauge shift in a weird govrnment department only to later find it ended up costing $300M a year to do a worse job than the previ0ous contract for doing thiuswhihcx was a half timre job for one hippy at USC in MArina del rey, the very last of the freaks who built this stuff still in the same place as an older guy, as he was in the late 70s and early 80s.
Haydn if you were at the AKA show in Los Angeles in the 1980s then you've see the building I"m talking about, it's literally right acoss the streer from that venue: USC/ISI. Rich lived about 12 bloicks from there and said once he could not believe he never ean into him at lunch as he worked nearby but jobn pointed out he wasn't much of a sushi fan which may explain it.
So that guy used to write stuff on a piece of paper and thsat was it, for 10 years he did that. Then there was an administretaive issiue that led to a lawsuit and a guy called Herb Schorr, who had signing authotity for USC and the Informational Sciences Institute it operated in the Marina.
