The Web Became a Strip Mall

The Web Became a Strip Mall
by Ian Bogost

One morning in 1999, while I sat at the office computer where I built corporate websites, a story popped up on Yahoo. An internet domain name, Business.com, had just sold for $7.5 million - a shocking sum that would be something like $14 million in today's dollars.

The dot-com era, then nearing its end, had been literally named for addresses such as this one. By that time, it had become easy for anyone to register and own a domain name - typically at a cost of $70 for a two-year stretch - which encouraged "squatting," wherein people would buy an address simply because they thought it would have some future value. Desirable URLs worked and traded like real estate, with actual domain-name agents, escrow, rental and sale deals, and commissions. The web was a place, and where you could be found mattered.

I pondered the web's placeiness after receiving a notice to renew one of my personal domains recently. It seemed pointless now: I'd bought the address decades ago, and it has been years since it got any real traffic. Being found online has long ceased to involve acquiring a plot of digital real estate for ourselves. Instead, we submerge in Big Tech service platforms, hoping to find engagement: by gaming the YouTube algorithm, perhaps, or spam-replying to Elon Musk’s posts on X.

Much is made of the tendency toward "personal brands" in the current era of the web, but domain names arguably originated the phenomenon. Back in the day, the ease of remembering and correctly typing a domain name into a browser address bar was paramount. Dot com was most desirable because people thought of it first; "Business.net" would have seemed like a knockoff by comparison. A short name was ideal. Likewise, a distinctive one: Yahoo.com, say. But, counterintuitive to the rules of brands and trademarks more generally, generic domain names were also highly desirable. When your mom or accountant sat down at a blank browser in 1999, they might not have known what they were looking for. Thus the appeal of Business.com (for what? for business). An apartment-rental site called Viva.com ended up using Rent.com as its primary domain instead, because people were looking to rent a place, not to live abstractly in Spanish.

Those of us who had commercial and creative lives starting in the dot-com era developed a special relationship with the domain name. Before owning or leasing a server became easy and cheap, people had "home pages" instead, their URLs often occluded behind long, forgettable domains owned by your university or internet-service provider. To own a domain, by contrast, was to exist at a top level online, akin to Yahoo or Amazon, at least in name. A domain staked a claim in the internet's Wild West. It was, well, a domain, a lair, a realm. Don’t find me at www-la1.my-webhost.net/~ianb; visit me at Bogost.com.

Many ordinary people would register a domain name as a way of affirming a commitment to a creative or commercial project, even if it never came to fruition. For years, I have paid to renew domains such as GelateriousEffects.com (a hypothetical brand for my gelato hobby) and Baudrillyard.com (a postmodernist lawn-mowing game I never built). To renew them was to keep those dreams alive.

Google changed all of this. The ability of a website to appear in search results - in response to a query such as apartment for rent in Kansas City - became more important than the ability to remember a URL. A practice that became known as search-engine optimization, SEO, supplanted domain-name speculation. To be discoverable online once meant putting up a shingle, having a place where your internet stuff happened. In the search age, controlling the route to that place became more important.

The social-media era further undermined domains. Home pages, to say nothing of personal websites, gave way to accounts on platforms. You didn't have a blog anymore; you hosted a blog on WordPress or Blogger. You had not a home page but a profile on MySpace or Facebook; instead of a stand-alone web store, you might just start an Etsy shop. Search has spread from Google to everything: You find stuff by fishing with keywords, not by navigating to a location. If the internet feels different to you today than it once did, this may be a large reason - a convenience that has reoriented everything.

Today, value lies in the ability to link, not the name of the place linked. QR codes allow people to access a catalog, a menu, or an ordering form by pointing a camera at a sign rather than typing an address. Instagram users, free to put links on their profile pages but unable to place them in the captions of their images, began using and referencing "Link in bio" services. Often, links in bios point to other services, such as Linktree, which branch out to more profiles elsewhere - YouTube, TikTok, and so on, an endless slink between places that incidentally have names, rather than named places. Domain names were invented because people couldn’t be expected to remember numerical server addresses as the internet grew. Now one doesn't even have to remember the names.

Domain names persist, of course, and they continue to bear value. In 2007, Business.com was sold at a 46-fold premium, for $345 million. You are probably reading this article on TheAtlantic.com, a corner of cyberspace from which this magazine would never decamp. But even so, you likely arrived here through a web search, or by clicking a link on LinkedIn or perhaps one shared via text message. A domain is necessary but no longer notable. A dot com is just a historical accident of the web's structure.

After three decades collecting domains, the ones I own have started to feel burdensome. I will never make Baudrillyard - it should have been a tweet, not a project. I will never open a gelato shop - it's enough to churn some ice cream for my friends. Bogo.st, a domain I registered during the heyday of URL-shortening tools (so I could personalize my short links on blogs or Twitter), costs me a modest $40 a year to maintain, but I never use it anymore. I'd rather spend that cash on cheeseburgers to put in my human mouth than on virtual plots on the internet.

So I've begun letting my domains lapse - the equivalent of finally junking an unfinished project in the closet or letting a yard grow feral. Business.com is just a website now. Viva.com is a European bank. Yahoo.com is a joke. A domain used to mark off the space for a dream online. Now most of those dreams have been realized, or abandoned.