First, I blame my phone. My e-mail is coming in but not going out and such glitches can generally be attributed to one’s phone. And to the vaguely mystical forces that exist in order to show us how terrible it is to check e-mail in bed first thing in the morning. But after minutes of pawing at settings, I notice my website isn’t working either. So I call up GoDaddy, to see what the trouble is. Like most people, I have limited interaction with my domain host. They are like the DMV or real estate brokers, who become, for brief and tedious moments, a part of your life. But as much as I have not felt compelled to check in with them, they have felt compelled to check in with me. For weeks, they have been trying to reach me via a Hotmail account that I let go to seed years ago. Unable to bill a canceled credit card, they e-mailed again and again, each time expecting a different result—which is the colloquial definition of insanity but okay. Now my name itself, my license plate since the inconvenient days of childhood, has been put up for auction.
“No problem,” I tell the customer service representative, demonstrating a staggering mix of denial and ease, “just take it down.”
This strikes me as a no-brainer. Perhaps this belies a lack of self-confidence, but how many people are lined up for sloanecrosley.com? I’ve always thought of personal domain names as sentimental objects, of value to precisely one person.
“We don’t have it anymore,” says the customer service rep.
“Well, who does?”
“That depends.”
Am I supposed to guess? What am I, a wizard?
It turns out a person or entity, a noun of some kind, has already purchased the site. No small part of me is amused by the idea of anyone acquiring my website. Apparently, I am the kind of person who would see getting burglarized as a reflection of the quality of her belongings first and as an invasion second. But my comprehension of the situation is still loading. I ask the same question—Wait, what happened?—over and over, thinking this guy is withholding the solution. Now who’s colloquially insane?
Unsure of how to further assist me, he transfers me to GoDaddy’s domain brokerage department, where a fellow named Adam gives it to me straight. Right now, my domain is being reassigned to the new owner and, while said owner’s information should be readily available, it isn’t. The Internet is still churning. I inform Adam that I’ve intermittently been able to crack into my e-mail, which shocks him as much as it does not shock me. My identity doesn’t want to let go of me any more than I want to let go of it.
“This is how it will work,” Adam continues. “I will make contact with the new owner and negotiate the best price possible. Usually it’s a few hundred dollars but it varies. You would pay that plus a twenty percent commission.”
I have questions. Setting aside the eye twitching I experience at alien terminology like “make contact,” how is Adam incentivized to negotiate on my behalf if he’s getting a commission?
“If it makes you feel any better,” he says, “I’m not getting the money.”
It does not make me feel better. Adam I like. If I could fix this by putting two hundred bucks in a paper bag and shipping it to a sympathetic man in a call center in Iowa, I would. It’s the corporate overlords I have a problem with. GoDaddy is not the only company ever invented. If you miss a payment with Verizon, they hunt you down like an animal. They don’t wait it out, tapping SOS into a tin can. And whatever happened to robocalls? And how dare he back me into defending Verizon.
Adam tells me these are solid points (into the suggestion box they go!) but none of them are libelous. My domain has been acquired by a third party through legitimate means. There is nothing GoDaddy can do except help me get it back.
“You’re welcome to make contact yourself but—”
“But you wouldn’t advise it,” I finish his sentence.
Understanding the severity of my problem for the first time, I go into string-pulling mode. This is known as grasping at straws when you have no strings to pull. But surely something can be done.
When it comes to customer service, I have a trick I am simultaneously proud and ashamed to share here. Proud because it works, ashamed because it is the behavior of a raving lunatic. If the usual means of contacting a company are not working, if you feel helpless and frustrated and like you would be very rich if only you were paid to repeat your issue to a panoply of departments, this is what you are to do: Go to the company’s homepage. Scroll down. See the “newsroom” button? Click on it. Here you will find the contact information of public-relations employees. PR is the one department within any corporation that wants to be contacted—or at least needs to be in case, say, two hundred million gallons of oil oopsie into the Gulf of Mexico. Now send a polite-to-the-point-of-obsequious note, explaining your tale of woe. Really get in there. These people don’t know you or how far you’ll go. They have no measure of your crazy. No one needs to know you have a full life with almost no cats.
Hear that sound? That’s the sound of your name being omitted from a group e-mail that reads “You want to take this one, Nancy?”
Randy, the executive assistant to the CEO, calls me immediately. He explains what I already know to be true, that GoDaddy had been trying to reach me via Hotmail before they gave up. I, in turn, explain that rattling off dates is like listing all the times you rang the doorbell of an abandoned house. For me, this just happened. I’m not saying it did. I messed up. But if Randy can’t help me legally, logistically, or financially, he can at least do me the courtesy of acknowledging my reality.
“I don’t check Hotmail,” I say for the umpteenth time. “I use it as a graveyard.”
For some reason, this metaphor strikes at the core of Randy.
“You know,” he says, “I think we’re similar people. Same approach to life, same habits.”
Under normal circumstances, I’d be inclined to think this was some kind of customer service gambit, but Randy does not work in customer service. Pop psychology is above his pay grade. A self-described “glass half full” kind of person, he’s just a nice guy with “CEO” at the ass end of his title and the burden of talking to me.
“Our guys are really good,” he assures me. “I’m sure you’ll get your site back.”
That I would not be afforded the opportunity to get my domain back had not occurred to me. I am sliding down the ladder of hope at an alarming speed. This morning, anything less than the reinstatement of my account and an apology for the inconvenience would have been unthinkable. Now I am praying for the privilege to send a stranger a piñata full of money. Never outside the realm of fiction have I so deeply fantasized about someone I didn’t know and had not seen. Never have I so desperately wanted to breach the barrier of unknowability to understand why a person was not responding to his or her e-mail. Never has my brain been host to the thought: It’s just the one planet. How hard could this be?
At 10:30 p.m., like a flashlight dying in a cave, my e-mail goes down for good, refusing to accept my password, which is an elaborate version of a password I’ve used since college. This feels a little like one’s in-box getting sudden-onset dementia. Don’t take it personally, you think. This isn’t you. This isn’t us.
I check the domain registration again. I am now property of a man named Al Perkins.
* * *
British Man Defends Buying B.C. Town Name and Turning It into Porn Site.
According to an article in the Canadian National Post, Al Perkins of the British dependency of Jersey recently nabbed the town of Barriere’s website and attempted to milk them for $9,700. This will turn out to be only partially true. Perkins does not actually reside on the island of Jersey, only registers his domains there, and Al is not his real name. But the unfortunate part—the milking part—checks out. When the town refused to pay, Perkins raised the stakes and flooded its site with pornography. Which is how visitors to barrierechamber.com wound up “greeted by a wall of explicit images in categories such as ‘college,’ ‘fantasy,’ and ‘gagging.’”
Well, that does not sound promising.
Technically, what Perkins is doing is legal. He owns the site, he can do what he likes with it, including redirect it. Though this is a seriously disproportionate response to a clerical error. Perkins’s defense is that if a domain means that much to someone, why wouldn’t he or she renew it? At first, I am struck by how nicely this argument dovetails with my own guilt. How could I have been so negligent? On the other hand, this is the philosophical equivalent of asking, “Why are you hitting yourself?” while slapping someone in the face with their own hand. I maintain my site. And I do so knowing absolutely no one is on the hunt for a 2006 rant about frozen yogurt. Unless I’ve committed a minor felony, traffic hovers at around eighty visitors per day, two of whom are most definitely my parents. But at least it’s mine. Was mine.
I assume barrierechamber.com will be dead—the town has moved on to the more literal pastures of barrierechamberofcommerce.com. Instead, it leads me to the Facebook page of one Wesley Perkins. This is surprising, as I gather most people in his line of work do not want to be found. And yet there he is, in his mid-forties with squinty blue eyes and sandy hair. There is something of the elfin Conan O’Brien about him. He is in a relationship with a pretty raven-haired woman named Lesley. There are pictures of their faces pressed close together. Wesley and Lesley. I wonder what Perkins would look like to the unbiased eye. He looks nice. Normal even. Under different circumstances, would I register his smile as an expression of joy and not the cackling of someone who probably cut his teeth stealing wallets from old ladies?
Reasonably, I know the profile of my buyer is irrelevant. It doesn’t matter how many puppies this man has skinned. But perhaps this information can be used to manipulate him in some abstract fashion. So I decide to update Adam. He, too, has seen the identity of my domain’s new owner. I ask if he’s dealt with “them” before. (Perkins is always “they” or “them.” This is domain grammar, shorthand for “I don’t know how many of who are doing what where.”) And yes, Adam has dealt with they. And no, he doesn’t sound pleased about having to do so again. I ask him if he’s aware that they has a sideline as an amateur pornography peddler who terrorizes Canadians.
“That I did not know,” he says.
What Adam does know is that we can expect an initial offer in the thousands. Oh, how high will we go, how far will we fall? And at what point am I no longer in the business of subsidizing a stranger? I don’t bother asking “now what?” because I know “now what.” Now we wait.
At 1:02 p.m. the next day, my phone rings. It’s my mother. I curse her name and send her to voice mail. At 1:04, the phone rings again. It’s Adam. They wants $8,700.
“Fuck they!” I scream into his ear. “Sorry, not you.”
“You can cuss all you want,” he says. “I’m just not allowed to.”
“But you kind of want to, don’t you?”
“He’s asking for a lot,” Adam concedes.
The pronoun is as much of a meltdown as I’m going to get. Over the next few hours, we start trading numbers with Perkins. Us: $1,000. Him: $5,000. Us: $3,200. Him: $4,800. I get the Potemkin-style impression of math being done.
“These numbers are so arbitrary,” I whisper.
I have come to the gym to blow off steam. I nearly slid off the treadmill when Adam called. Now I am speaking to him in the open stairwell, agitated but trying to keep my voice down. Between lulls of acceptance I have bouts of revolt. We’re talking about four years’ worth of electric bills. A trip to Borneo. Thirteen good cashmere sweaters. Twelve hundred cups of coffee.
A woman in a unitard dismounts an elliptical machine and asks me to be quiet.
“I’m sorry,” I say, covering the speaker, “it’s an emergency.”
“I’m trying to work out,” she says, pointing at the elliptical machine so I know where it is.
I came here to sweat out my anger. I don’t see why she can’t do the same. Also, who doesn’t bring headphones to the gym? I am about to respond to her—my usual reserves of annoyance are being employed elsewhere but I’m sure I can muster up something for the occasion—when she points at the ground.
“You dropped something,” she says.
I look down to see the credit card I had lost. I must have left it in my gym shorts the last time I wore them. I canceled the credit card in December. It’s now February. So not only am I at fault for letting my digital self go, but I am at fault for letting my actual self go. I wince, tell Adam to offer $3,500, and hang up the phone.
Meanwhile, my existence has been completely colonized by Perkins. Competing distractions and obligations have been minimized as if on a screen. The only icon left is Perkins’s face. The face of a man who, in a sane world, should give no thought to my existence beyond the occasional humbling sense we all get when looking up at the stars or learning about major cities in China. But he has forcibly bound us together. So I find out everything I can. Which, as it turns out, is a lot.
A night of reconnaissance reveals multiple complaints leveled against Perkins via the World Intellectual Property Organization. WIPO is appointed by ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. As fabricated and intergalactic as these organizations sound, they’re the only recourse for people in my situation. The Internet doesn’t have borders. If your identity gets usurped by someone in a foreign country, there’s not a ton you can do about it. In an effort to address this issue while simultaneously creating more acronyms, WIPO uses a Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy (UDRP) for issues “arising from alleged abusive registrations of domain names.” Yet even this is not ideal. It takes eight months to resolve a case, for a minimum fee of $1,500. But apparently Perkins is worth it.
One complaint is of particular interest to me. It was filed by a woman named A. D. Justice, who writes novels about men who work for a security company. The covers feature bare-chested hunks with mystifying muscle groups. She doesn’t have a trademark but she might as well. Her domain is “the identifier of her work.” After redirecting it to a porn site, Perkins offered to sell it back to her for the bargain price of $6,700. But her mama didn’t name her “Justice” for nothing. An ICANN panel transferred her domain back to her after finding Perkins’s actions to be “indicative of bad faith,” a phrase I hope to incorporate more in my daily life. I notice you’ve asked me to accompany you to a wedding on the day of the wedding and I find your actions indicative of bad faith. Good day to you, sir!
If it were just my website at stake, I would follow her lead. I have a middle initial and I am prepared to deploy it. I also work freelance, which means I have no problem squeezing in a vengeance project. But Perkins is also in possession of my primary e-mail address. On the surface, this is no great prize—GoDaddy’s e-mail interface is a notch under medieval—but it happens to be host to the majority of my life’s correspondence. I don’t have time for the law.
At long last, Perkins appears again, demanding $4,200. I pay it. Amex texts me a fraud alert. Because even the robots know something is wrong. But as my confirmation whooshes through the phone, I feel relief. Granted, it’s the relief of a man trapped between a boulder and a canyon wall who has decided to chop his own arm off. My options were whittled down but there is control to be had in choosing one. Alas, this feeling is fleeting. Something bad has happened. No one has died. I am not injured or unemployed. I made a mistake and paid for it by wrestling with a pig. Not only did the pig like it, the pig has moved on to other troughs. But I have not.
I pull up the screenshot I took of Perkins’s contact information. I know I should delete it. I have paid for two services for the price of one—to get my name back and to get him out of my life. But I find the second benefit unsatisfying. It feels as if, on top of everything else, he took the last word.
Before I can talk myself out of it, I write to him. I explain that I would like to meet him and promise that I am not a nut, come to demand her money back. I just want to ask him a few questions about his business. As he’s perfectly aware, I am a writer. And as I am perfectly aware, he is a walking series of transactions with human skin stretched over them. I reason that I just paid him $4,200 to sit down with me. He writes back a few hours later, his name appearing in my newly recovered in-box. He addresses me by my first name, which makes sense. For a hot minute, he was me. He is amenable to chatting but, before we go any further, I should know it’s “just business” and I shouldn’t “take it personal.” He closes with “kind regards.” No name beneath. The regards are just floating there, a sentiment sent from no one.
* * *
I have two weeks before I fly to London, where Perkins has agreed to meet me. In this time, we speak once. He is monosyllabic at first, emitting the occasional Cockney “yeah,” but once he gets going, he speaks with great enthusiasm about his work. He can’t seem to decide if he should brag about his achievements or treat me as suspect for asking. He wants me to know how lucky I am to be speaking with him. He feels at a disadvantage that I know what he looks like but he doesn’t know what I look like, so he finds images of me online and chastises me for looking different in some photos than I do in others. I have no explanation for this. A few minutes later, he has a revelation that it’s the glasses. Sometimes I’m wearing them and sometimes I’m not.
After the call, he e-mails regularly, wanting to know how many of me are coming, if I’ll be “chaperoned.” Chances are I’ll be coming by private plane on account of me being a writer. He vacillates between helpful and unresponsive. Most missives are peppered with “lol”s. He becomes fixated on the idea that I follow him on Twitter and insinuates that he won’t meet me unless I do. At one point, he casually refers to himself as the “wolf of the dot-com.” He’s not serious … but he’s a little serious.
It’s becoming clear I have no idea who I’m dealing with—but I know who does.
A. D. Justice’s real name is Angel Burrage. Turns out her mama didn’t name her “Justice,” period. She lives in a small town in northwest Georgia and has a voice meant to be threaded into a pillow. And she’s happy to chat with a stranger about what happened to her. Unlike me, she did read GoDaddy’s renewal e-mails. But she was in the midst of switching over from an old Wordpress site and associated the warnings with property she wanted to lose anyway. So she sat back and did nothing.
“When I realized what happened, I e-mailed him, thinking any normal human being would say, ‘Oh, I didn’t realize,’ and sell it back to me for whatever he paid for it. But that’s not what he asked for.”
When Angel didn’t immediately respond to Perkins’s offer, he initiated another conversation, bluntly laying out her choices: not buy the domain, hire a lawyer, or just buy it back from him now. She reasoned she would rather “pay someone to take it away from him than give him a cent.” But before she could state her position, she received another message: “Too late. This is no longer for sale.”
“He was a real jerk about it,” she says. “In one of his e-mails, he wrote, ‘It’s not like you’re a bestseller or anything.’”
“Oh no, he didn’t.”
“He did. He was fishing for me to object so he could ask for more money. The whole thing was devastating. I was angry at myself for not understanding the process and with him for fully understanding it. I really wanted to track him down, you know?”
I do know. And it’s nice to hear my impulses echoed back to me, as everyone in my life has reacted like I’m running toward a burning building.
“It’s just hurtful,” she says. “All of a sudden I could see everything I had worked to build being flushed away. I felt so violated.”
The word sits heavy in my ears. Violated. I had not yet identified the feeling myself, but while negotiating with Perkins I was anxious and sleepless and absolutely convinced I was going to get hit by a car. At one point, my neighbor came up behind me as I was putting my key in our door and I spun around, ready to push him off the stoop.
For some people, specifically creative professionals, an eponymous website is not just another avatar—it’s the real-time representation of their life’s work. Come, feast your eyes on the output that I hath scraped together between the walls of my dwelling! Or, as Angel puts it: “I didn’t so much feel stolen from. I felt as if someone had stolen me.” Unfortunately, these same people are not known for their logistical prowess. A website is often their sole foray into the tech world, the second-most administrative thing they do after refilling a stapler. They build these shrines to self out of necessity so that they can get back to work out of greater necessity.
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 the spot. He says he chose to meet in London over his native Birmingham because there’s more for me to see here. He’s assigned himself the role of research assistant, suggesting people for me to talk to, cases to look up. He’s even sent me random closeout auction domains so that I can “save them from my same fate.” Among them are a country singer, a third-generation heating and cooling business, a wellness author, and a domestic-abuse hotline. He would call himself but he “sounds too much like a scammer” to be believed.
“So you’ve done this before?” I asked. “Tracked people down?”
“’Course I have.”
Now, as I pace and cajole, he wants to know how my “savior mission” went. I report that some people were grateful—though only moderately so, as it’s hard to grasp the emotional and financial consequences of letting your domain expire until it happens—and some never responded. Perhaps because “an urgent message regarding your domain” sounds about as unurgent as messages come. Or the timing was farcically bad. The heating and cooling company’s Web designer was on a cruise in the middle of the Atlantic. With the country singer, I wrote to his manager and his agent, to no avail. I tried to get to him through his Twitter profile, only to find a “Hey guys, taking a break from social media. Mental health!”
“You see?” Perkins asks, almost gleefully. “You get it now. Even if you’re trying to be a Good Samaritan, half the time it doesn’t work anyway.”
* * *
A pipe has burst in the pub Perkins selected, so we agree to meet outside. He is his profile picture come to life—forty-six, five nine, compact and quick-gestured. He grins when he spots me, an open smile that pokes into his cheeks. Yesterday’s trepidations seem to have melted away. He greets me warmly, kissing me on the cheek. He wants to make sure I accurately describe what he’s wearing: “I got on brand boots, slim-fit jeans, a muscle-fit T-shirt. Athletic build, would you say?” We proceed to speed-weave through the streets of Marylebone, a neighborhood with which he’s only marginally familiar, but Lesley wanted to do some shopping here (sexist but inevitable thought: her and whose money?). He’s concerned that another pub will be too loud. So we settle on a café, which is fine by Perkins because he doesn’t drink.
“If you hear my phone bleeping,” he warns me, “I’m bidding on domains.”
He winks. My face contorts like a baby’s, practicing amusement. I have never reminisced with someone about the time they took my money and my identity. He orders a soda and thanks me for earning him an unexpected $4,800 yesterday. What $4,800? I am as confused as he wants me to be. Apparently, while we spoke on the phone last night, Perkins was in the midst of negotiations. Panicked by the silence, the domain’s rightful owner increased his bid to meet Perkins’s asking price.
“So really I have to thank you, Sloane. You did that.”
My stomach turns. Perkins’s second-favorite activity after domain acquisition is needling me. (When I informed him that I’d be staying with a friend, I got a “You have friends?” in return.) He seems to be waiting for a “You’re welcome.” I change the subject. Perkins is self-taught, having stumbled into his current revenue stream by accident four years ago. He’s an “online trader” and was looking for an expired domain for himself, one that had some traffic already, when he came across unitedfinancial.org. He bought it, but it turned out the credit union wanted it back. So Perkins sold it to them for a cool $15,000.
“That’s still the highest domain sale I ever done. I tend to keep it just under 10K. It’s sort of like psychology. I’ve found that if you keep it under 10K, it gives people hope. So if you give ’em a carrot at 9.7K, yeah? They think they can get it at 5K. And if we do a deal at 5K, I’m happy because I’ve only paid a few hundred and they’re happy because they’ve gotten a good price.”
I search my memory for a time I’ve felt “happy” since this happened. Nope. Nothing.
Soon Perkins was trolling auction sites for nearly expired domains. He prefers fishing for preexisting domains over squatting on ones he suspects might be valuable, so he set the parameters for an algorithm to do just that. Perkins has a nemesis in the form of a domainer in LA called Scarface (“Me and him hammer away at it all the time”). He’s written Scarface in the hopes of teaming up since they’re costing each other thousands of dollars a year but Scarface is a lone wolf. No matter, Perkins knows his algorithm is better. It doesn’t just search for traffic, but for the status of a site, organic traffic, and, most crucially, the duration of ownership. Perkins claims not to target individuals, but his algorithm is a heat-seeking missile for personal domains. We look like what we are—people who have lost something and will want it back. By his own admission, celebrities and corporations “tend to have enough people looking that someone always warns ’em before I get there.”
“Your problem,” he concludes, “is that you’re not more famous.”
“Yes, that’s definitely my problem.”
“And what the hell were you using Hotmail for? You deserve to lose your site just for that.”
Perkins slaps the table and laughs. He may have the moral center of a Cadbury Creme Egg but he’s also starting to sound like every single one of my friends.
“You just gotta ask yourself,” he levels with me, “how do you value your brand? Some people think no, I’m not giving him the money, because they want to make a stance, but the stance can harm their business. And hey, I lose a lot. Sometimes I’m buying twenty domains at a time and spending two thousand dollars, yeah? It’s like being in a casino. You know when your number drops in and you’re like ‘Yes!’? That’s what it feels like. But what happens if I don’t sell anything? You start to get on the brink. It’s highly risky.”
Perkins sees himself as a casualty of his chosen profession, which is a bit like a cat burglar becoming irate because he threw out his back scaling your building. But this is the reasoning required to do his job. He loses money. He gets threatened. People have vowed to hunt him down and cut his throat. Even so, I can tell that it takes such extremes for him to register contact as anything but further proof that humanity is divided into chumps and not chumps. There are countless ways to divide the world in two. Gender, religion, nut allergies. But Perkins does some of the more cynical line-drawing I’ve ever witnessed. When I tell him as much, he says he doesn’t see it that way. Not at all. In fact, he thinks he’s providing a service.
“Listen,” he says, leaning in close. “The domain could end up in someone’s hands who’s bad. Some of these mega-rich domainers, they won’t even sell you the domain back, yeah? They use it for traffic or adverts. At least I’m giving people the opportunity to buy it back.”
This steal-from-the-rich, sell-to-the-poor policy ebbs and flows. Perkins cops to the real reason he sometimes contacts domain owners at the last minute—and it’s not because he’s trying to be an upstanding citizen. It’s because he “got carried away” in an auction and would rather those people purchased their sites back before he has to pay for them. I am visibly disappointed but, as Perkins points out, the calculus cuts both ways. The real reason he redirects personal sites to pornographic ones is not so nefarious as it seems. It’s so he can turn a profit while he waits for the original owner to pony up the cash. And should the flashes of asses expedite the process? All the better.
Plus, as he is quick to remind me, it’s all perfectly legal. I posit the idea that legality and morality don’t always overlap. There are a lot of bad things in this world that are perfectly legal. Laws are created by man and man is fallible. He shrugs. He has my money and I don’t so he’s more or less done with this particular debate.
“The interesting thing,” he muses, “is there seems to be a lot of personal sites now. A lot of what I call ‘love me’s. You know, the girls who love themselves and it’s all ‘I’m this, I’m that, blah blah blah,’ because they watch too much TV and they get caught up in their own lives and they all think they’re Kim Kardashian.”
I know exactly of what he speaks, having screenshotted an Instagram feed or two in my time and texted it to a like-minded friend. But I am unwilling to turn my back on my own gender in his presence. Perkins concedes that there are exceptions to the rule. Like his own daughter, a college student with her own lifestyle and fashion site. He set it up for her—and nearly let it expire.
“Can you believe it? Bad! I know. But I have thousands of ’em.”
“Does she know what you do for a living?”
“She just knows I do something with domains. The thing you have to understand, yeah? Is that this is all a simple business transaction. I don’t do nothing to people. If you value your entire business at five hundred dollars, then it’s time to close your doors. It’s a self-inflicted lesson.”
Talking to Perkins is like talking to a perfectly reasonable person until, only when he turns to the side, you see a little chunk of his head is missing. Because he’s not wrong—not a bastion of ethics, but not wrong. He’s taking advantage of a deeply flawed system. If you lose a watch and I buy it for cheap at a flea market and then wind up selling it back to you on eBay, well, I can sleep at night knowing I’ve done that. Chances are I’m not just giving it back. What bothers me is the idea of doing it every day, intentionally combing the world for lost watches until I am an expert watch reseller and, more frighteningly, an expert sleeper. Until people are not people but watches with wrists still in them. I suggest that Perkins could be doing something else with his time—he has an eye for the stock market, a certain charm and, clearly, Web experience—but he shakes his head no. He likes the thrill of this too much. Plus, he thinks he’s hungrier for it than most.
“I’m not like these domainer guys who do this who are from rich backgrounds. I’m more from the streets. And I do think other people have more money than me. I mean, take you. You live in New York. Your apartment costs three million dollars.”
At this, I can’t help but smile. Between him and GoDaddy, I paid over two months’ rent to get back something I owned and made. This wasn’t a medical expense or an airfare change fee, both infuriating but both the price of living life. In this case, I just set the money on fire. Until I am on the ransom end of an actual hostage situation, this will be the most painful expense I ever have. And let’s say I did live in a three-million-dollar apartment. That wouldn’t mean I deserved this. But if there’s one business Perkins and I have both willingly entered, it’s the business of being an adult. In the end, it is not my place to convince him what he’s doing is wrong any more than it’s his to convince me that it isn’t.
“You think I should feel guilty,” he says, as we leave the café. “I never feel guilty. If I was rich, maybe I’d keep the algorithm going and set up a charity and tell all these people to donate to some cause instead of paying me.”
He smiles, running a simulation of this alternate future in which he is lauded for what he does. I tell him I’m not sure that would work. People don’t donate to charity under duress.
“Oh, trust me,” he says, holding the door open, “they would.”