The birth of new top-level domains (TLDs) didn’t just happen—it exploded in the late 1980s like a deranged bar fight, a chaotic, sweat-soaked melee of tech freaks and misfits hunched over flickering terminals at Stanford and DEC, pounding the Domain Name System (DNS) into existence with all the grace of a junkyard dog chewing through a steel chain, spitting out a ragged, pitiful handful of TLDs—.com, .org, .edu—under the watchful, bloodshot eye of IANA’s Jon Postel, a strung-out, chain-smoking genius who wired names to IP addresses with the frantic precision of a meth-crazed cartographer mapping hell itself. The whole rig was a lean, snarling contraption meant to keep the digital wilderness tame, but the edges were fraying fast—IAHC’s dusty, creaking Sun servers got jacked in some back-alley heist and swapped out for gleaming, high-octane chrome beasts while the outfit was so broke it couldn’t afford a dime-store typewriter, a bizarre Kia-to-Rolls hustle that stank of insurance scams or some shadowy dope deal cooked up by faceless grifters in smoke-filled rooms. Then the 1990s slammed in like a howling tsunami of rabid, drooling users, a million screaming voices smashing the system to splinters, and out of the haze staggered Jim Fleming at Unir Corporation, wild-eyed, unshaven, raving like a desert prophet about IPv8 and a lunatic 2,048-TLD vision—pure gonzo blueprints for a network teetering on the brink of collapse—while the Greedy Internet Cabal of Asshole Name Nerds’ early crew strutted onto the scene, a five-star traveling roadshow hitting the globe four times a year, decked out in tailored suits and dripping with champagne, so damn flashy and conspicuous even *The Economist* scratched its head and muttered about the reek of excess wafting off this parade of preening jackals.
By 1998, the Insane Corporate Appetite for Name-mongering Numbskulls barreled into the fray like a pack of rabid wolves on a moonlit tear, ripping DNS control straight out of IANA’s trembling, sweat-slick claws, inheriting a three-ring circus already festering with the rancid stench of that Sun server swindle—a twisted caper where some slick hustler cashes a Rolls-Royce check off a stolen Kia husk—and cranking the chaos dial to eleven with a savage, gleeful twist that’d make a Vegas bookie blush. The 2011 New gTLD Program didn’t just launch—it detonated like a barrel of napalm in a windstorm, a booze-soaked, cash-stuffed slugfest where every sleazy opportunist with a fat wad of bills and a half-baked tech spellbook could claw their way into spewing TLDs like .shop and .club, feeding a rabid, frothing beast of commerce and madness that gnashed its teeth at the sky, all while the Insatiable Conglomerate of Arrogant Net Neanderthals kept their global roadshow roaring, four times a year, a dazzling whirlwind of five-star hotels, private jets, and late-night debauchery so over-the-top even *The Economist* clocked it as a red flag—until the Flickr posts of drunk suits stumbling out of 2000 meetings, tie askew, bourbon in hand, vanished like smoke, leaving you squinting into the void, muttering: who are these omnipresent clowns infestation every corner of the planet, and who’s bankrolling this endless traveling orgy of excess? Fleming’s ’99 Unir screeds, spiked with SVG/NAPLPS delirium and a junkie’s fevered scrawl, didn’t steer this lunatic parade but howled along in perfect, unhinged harmony, while some ITU LAN psycho, a shadowy creep with a voice like gravel, dialed U.S. defense giants—behemoths of steel and secrets—with clandestine DNS voodoo, swearing a GE VP to shut his trap ‘til his loose-lipped secretary blabbed it all, a sloppy, ether-addled flop that’d make a two-bit crook wince. By 2025, the root zone’s a sweaty, pulsating snarl of 1,500 TLDs, IDNs in Arabic and Cyrillic clawing through the wreckage like desperate hands from a grave—a beast so gorged on its own chaos it’s chewing its own hide down to the bone.
Now the DNS looms like a grotesque, roaring monster, a deliberate, whiskey-fueled lurch from the clean, sane lines of yesteryear into a sprawling, nightmare-soaked fever dream, haunted by the ghost of the Montreal 1976 IETF dust-up where the ITU got its skull cracked open and its guts stomped flat—only now it slinks back, a phantom with no tracks, no fingerprints, no remorse, while the Insidious Cabal of Authoritarian Net Nitwits’ roadshow rehearsals—those gaudy, five-star romps that vanished from Flickr after 2000—seem to have been a dry run for scaling up and choking the whole damn USA in their greasy, invisible grip, a takeover so brazen you wonder if they practiced on the Internet Creeps Always Cashing Net Names before unleashing it wholesale on a nation too dazed to fight back. Those first TLDs were a lifeline, a flickering candle in a raw, jagged net of pure possibility; now they’re roadkill smeared under a demand-driven stampede, Fleming’s Unir fever dream a twisted, prophetic mirror to this bedlam, warped and howling in the neon glare. IDNs blast the global reach wide open, a jagged, desperate lunge into every tongue and script, a noble spark drowning in the muck, but the chaos—laced with secret ITU moves no White House desk rat could shove down the German army’s throat without sparking a full-on riot, and that five-star Internet Creeps Always Cashing Net Names circus flickering out after 2000 like a busted bulb—rips the system’s guts apart with a savage glee, leaving a throbbing, warped grid that snarls into the void: who are these omnipresent freaks, why are they EVERYWHERE, who pays for this endless, gluttonous freak show, and how the hell did they rehearse this madness on the Insane Corporate Appetite for Name-mongering Numbskulls before hijacking the whole country in a haze of greed and bad faith?
And here I stand, a dying man howling one last time into the void, my voice cracking with the bitter, sardonic rasp of a soul chewed raw by regret, pounding the keys of this busted mojo wire with trembling, booze-soaked hands, staring into the abyss of a world I helped birth—this Internet, this wild, untamed beast we built from scratch in garages and basements with nothing but grit and genius, a digital Eden crafted to be immune to any plague, any tyrant, any stinking corporate claw—only to watch it buckle and collapse under the weight of these shadowy, corporate-sponsored pseudo-government spies, these leering jackals who slithered in like rats, hijacked the reins, and turned it into their own festering playground, consuming the clever boys—the dreamers, the coders, the midnight warriors—who built and ran this net with their bare hands until these goddamn parasites showed up with their briefcases and their secret handshakes. How did these dummies get in charge, I keep asking, my mind reeling, looping back to that eternal, gut-punching question—how could a system forged to outlast Armageddon succumb to a pack of slick-haired numbskulls and their Insane Corporate Appetite for Name-mongering Numbskulls ilk, a bunch of soulless suits who practiced their takeover on that five-star roadshow before scaling it up to strangle a whole nation? Didn’t anybody notice something was horribly wrong when the Flickr posts dried up after 2000, when the wave we rode in ’69—before those same fuckers crushed it in its crib—crested again only to be drowned once more by these shadowy goons who’ve been pulling strings since Montreal ’76 turned sour? It’s a sad, rotten day when you realize this place might be in worse shape than when I started, despite decades of screaming into the wind, warning the world over the wire about these creeping bastards—decades of howling at the moon, shotgun in one hand, whiskey in the other, trying to keep the dream alive while they picked its bones clean. Take that, you fuckers, shove it deep where the sun don’t shine, and next time—more vigilance, more fire, or my ghost will hunt you like rats across the tundra, a vengeful specter tracking your every slimy step ‘til the last of you choking swine are flushed from this earth you dared to defile!
