No, I would certainly agree that a business created for e-Mail would be a dot-com. Or for FTP. I believe the term, in common usage, means the companies that sprang up to use the internet. That would apply to any of the protocols. It would not simply mean a company that used e-mail in its business, as that's every company (and was the majority of companies on the net back then, whether they admitted it or not.) Every company is not a "dot com," now or then.

Which company or companies are you suggesting were founded to use internet E-mail as their business platform?

The reason I concluded there were none, both back then when I tracked this keenly, and now, in retrospect, is that this would have violated the AUP, unless the company sold only products in support of research and education. This doesn't mean they could not have existed, but they would have to have been semi-underground. ClariNet got around that by using the NSFNet to feed research and educational customers, and then having them feed local commercial customers USENET style. Once the data had arrived at the lab or school over the backbone, the NSF had no problem if it was copied on a regional network not funded by NSF. With email, this was more difficult. Not that people din't ignore that, but I am interested to know who you refer to.

If Mosaic/HTML is the internet, then GNN, which I discuss, is a likely claimant. I don't think that HTML is the internet, though. And while I do expect some people to think that, I didn't expect it on /. as much.

That's actually part of my goal. Sure, I wanted to tell the story of the part I played, but I am genuinely interested in documenting the history of that time. The memory blurs after 20 years so I would like to hear more stories told.

Amazon is certainly a dot-com. It was created for the internet, it sells only over the internet.

What do you think it means to be a "dot-com?" I would be interested in other definitions. I discuss the most obvious ones (just having a domain in the .com TLD) or doing some business over the internet (which goes back to BBN) but I would be interested in your alternate definition.

Well, often the phone is sold by a cell phone store, so this is not always true. But my impression is they don't turn that much of a profit on the phones -- I mean technically they sell them below cost.

However, there is clearly a number where the carrier makes the same amount of money by giving you a discount for your 2 year, no-subsidized-phone contract as subsidizing your phone for the contract. Perhaps it's not a discount of $200, perhaps it is less. Whatever it is, that would be good.

But of course it also gives the carrier control. And it makes the handset vendors beholden to the carriers because you can't sell a handset if the carrier won't put it on the subsidy list, so you take out features etc.

The iPhone turned that around a bit, with Apple dictating some things to AT&T, but caving in on others as well.

The U.S. market is dominated by subsidized phones. Get $200 off a phone, agree to a contract (2 years in US, 3 in Canada) where you pay back a lot more than the $200 credit you were given. From a business standpoint, of course they are not going to subsidize you faster, at least not as a rule.

However, this system has hurt the phone market. It creates higher margins in cell phone retailing (that's why you see so many cell phone stores everywhere) and for handset vendors, but it also requires that phones have annoying subsidy locks that stop you from going easily to other carriers, or putting in other SIMs when overseas -- enabling huge roaming charges.

It would be better if you could say, "Look, instead of $200 off a phone, if I bring my own phone, will you give me $10/month off my plan if I commit to 2 years?" Costs the carrier the same, approximately.

Then we would get more competition in handsets, and less carrier control of handsets too.

Check the first reference on that wikipedia article. I'm the guy who first interviewed him, so of course I know about him. But DEC, while it did that ad over E-mail, was not what we would consider a dot-com.

Perhaps it's a quibble, and of course we all favour the definition that makes our point, but I don't think that was a company created for the internet, which is what I view a dot-com as, and more a company with an existing business that made use of the internet to facilitate it. I would be curious to see reports of porn for sale via FTP, or a company that sold porn only via E-mail.

I'm happy to include others claims, and I do mention a variety of other companies. But there's a pretty good chance it was the first, because the flamewars over it were pretty much assuming that, and I know I was the one to convince Steve Wolff that it would be OK to do a business over the internet sold to universities and labs. So whoever might have been doing it earlier (which is entirely possible) kept a low profile, but I would be interested to document their story. Perhaps it's a bit vain, but what of it?

I put that in quotes in the story, but the /. editors took 'em out. They also took changed "the dot-com" to just dot-com in the title which reads wrong to me, but who knows?

Strangely, it was the trademark lawyers who figured out, centuries ago, that ownership rights should only be given in names without inherent value, for which you create the value. Generic terms, with meaning and inherent value, can't be owned.

We should have listened to their wisdom (odd to say that) but instead we built a space where an infinite resource became scarce, because we made just one prime area, .com, for commerce, so owning word.com was as good, or better than owning "word" -- and nobody should own words.

And thus all our domain troubles, and speculation, were born. The only way out of it would be to remove the specialness of .com, which is a lot harder to do now than in the past. If there were a modest number of equally valuable TLDs -- themselves with no special meaning, made up terms -- so that no one was inherently better than another, and so you could always find what you wanted, it would be good. But com means commercial and so will be special for decades.

I would have thought so but a surprising number of German speakers have said they still enjoy it.

On the other hand there is a Downfall parody where the characters are complaining that the subtitles are wrong, but that's fine, and why do the German speakers keep complaining about it. You were already beaten to it.

But that's the point here. Hitler is screaming and angry. Of course he would be expected to be using strong words there. While we think of Hitler as the greatest villain of the modern age, strangely, it is still funny for a subtitle to have him say fuck. So it was added. It was appropriate. It was, however, quite rare for the EFF feed, but not impossible. It was not actually in the feed anyway. So Apple was just plain silly, and we have to assume this is happening other times where we don't hear about it. That's worth understanding as we want to understand how different software ecosystems, including walled gardens, work.

The feed only has profanity very rarely. However, it is not one that tries explicitly to remove it. In this case it was appropriate, and it was not in the feed itself, but in a video pointed to by the feed. The app was, I suppose, meant for EFF fans to let them have a little EFF app on their screen. I don't know how valuable an app that is, but it's not something to block.