The domain nets.com is wrapping up another auction on Ebay today, the auction ending in 4 hours plus is currently bid up to $125,000. The owners are in the spotlight today as the Daily Caller did an article titled, ‘Nets.com’ Owner Is Internet’s Greatest Troll.
The article goes on to talk about the owner a 69-year-old lady and her son, the author also gets something wrong attributing the Whisky.com sale for $3.1 million made by the Nets.com owner instead of the Castello Brothers.
The owner of Nets.com is Jane Hill, 69 from New Mexico who acquired the Nets.com domain name in 1996 when her company, Cyber Mesa Telecom, bought an Internet provider that had used the name.
Andrew Kew of The New York Times did a feature on her and the Brooklyn Nets frustration.
From the article:
The Nets’ front office, however, is less amused. The team has strongly rejected the $5 million price tag Hill put on the domain name.
“Our website is BrooklynNets.com, and our fans know this is our site,” said Barry Baum, a team spokesman. “Brooklyn Nets is our brand, and we have no interest in Nets.com, despite the shameful efforts of the registrant to attempt to sell us this domain name for seven figures.”
What the Nets called shameful Hill calls smart business. As the owner of Cyber Mesa Telecom, a small telephone and Internet provider that employs about two dozen people in a low-slung office a half-mile from the city’s rodeo ground, she is a natural entrepreneur with an eclectic résumé: She operated a travel agency and a hotel in Greece before turning to photography, specializing in capturing the nuances of metallic sculptures.
In 1999, with the dot-com boom in full swing, Hill sold the domain name Roadrunner.com to Time Warner for a seven-figure sum, a sale that was never publicly disclosed.
That experience has apparently emboldened Hill to seek a similar sum from the Nets. In 1996, she paid $20,000 to acquire 500 subscribers from an Internet provider that was leaving the industry, and Nets.com happened to be the domain associated with it. She said 50 people or so still used Nets.com email addresses.
“It’s a word in the dictionary,” she said, touting the domain’s potential value.
Read the full article on The New York Times website
Back to the Daily Caller story when discussing the cat and mouse games between Hill and the Nets owner,
Hill and her son can afford to play this hilarious game of cat and mouse for quite a while; they just sold “Whisky.com” for $3.1 million last year.
That is not true as the Castello Brothers sold Whisky.com
Awesome story on the New York Times that’s great I would’ve never thought a 69-year-old woman owned the name.
Daily caller that’s just bad reporting how could they not know that the Castello brothers sold the name ?
People should not lie about something they did not sell. I guess they lied to get more attention.