The million dollar mystery behind Milk.com
49 comments
·September 4, 2025thomassmith65
xoa
>That is not exactly how I remember things. Everyone bought domains from one registrar (was it Network Solutions?) and the cheapest domain started at around $100
By the mid to late 90s (my own earliest domain) yes. But a quick whois on milk.com shows a creation date of 1985-01-01, and that dates back to basically the foundation of DNS at all, RFC 882 & 883 were 1983. Initially it was just the Stanford Research Institute manually maintaining HOSTS.TXT for arpanet. IIRC you like, literally called up Elizbeth Feinler during business hours and just asked and that was it. This is all second hand because I was just a wee lad at that point and wouldn't even discover BBS until well after that heady era!
As things got formalized yeah unfortunately some players were able to start grabbing at monopolies, and NetSol began operating the registry for DISA in I think 91 or 92? It was still initially free, but then pretty quickly they started commercializing. But if someone got in truly on the ground floor it was pretty informal, academic and free. Getting a block of IPv4 was pretty easy/free for a long while into the 90s as well.
thomassmith65
That explains it, thanks! I wasn't on the net till the '90s
kragen
That wasn't the early days of the internet. It was free when I registered ear.org in probably 01994, 24 years after the ARPANET started and 16 years after the first TCP/IP internet nodes. You just had to have a nameserver set up.
Shortly after that they started charging, and I hadn't carried out my plans with it, so I let it go, figuring that someone else would make better use of it.
They didn't.
muragekibicho
I googled ear.org. Complete waste tbh. It's just blank
rwmj
Plus you could only interact with NS by filling in fields in a text file and emailing it to them, and hoping you did it right so their script made the changes you intended. Even at the time, this was annoying.
euroderf
> (was it Network Solutions?)
rs.internic.net, if memory serves. It stopped redirecting to anything some years ago.
null
neom
You could get free domains in the 90s still, a few that were totally free because they wanted to sell you hosting, many of them ad supported with an iframe however (although you could easily break out of the iframe and present your content without it).
Waterluvian
If he’s sitting on a domain that’s actually worth millions and has a well-paying job, maybe he’d get a bite for “I’ll accept less than 10 if you match it 1:1 with a donation to <charity>.”
It’s his and he can do what he wants. In fact I think it’s cool that there’s still a Classic Web holdout like this. But there’s latent joy locked away in that url.
RyJones
I had a lot of offers for wicker.com. In 98? 99? some guy asked what I wanted, and I said give me something interesting so I have a good story to tell.
He offered a 1544 Dante, which I accepted. His gig was auctioning estates and his wife imported and sold wicker.
reactordev
There are a lot of people that saw domain names as real estate in the 90s. :D
vitalnodo
I found out about milk.com when I was thinking about how to make an Android app completely from scratch (assembling DEX bytes from zero, kind of like writing an assembler for the Dalvik VM). That’s when I came across the author of the DEX format, Dan Bornstein — and I was surprised he actually owns a domain like that.
Brajeshwar
In a weird way, when someone mentions something about milk with a domain name, it always remind me of the Milk Table.
mzajc
I don't dislike the design, but this (500€!) aquarium is criminally small, and there's two fish in there!
https://milk.dk/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Milk_aquarium-102...
decimalenough
Not to be confused with a milking table. (Not a term I'd recommend googling at work, by the way.)
m-hodges
I thought this was going to be about Kevin Rose.¹
¹ https://techcrunch.com/2011/04/26/milk-completes-1-5-million...
rwmj
purple.com was a similar thing. Originally the site had just a FAQ page about how they didn't want to sell the domain:
https://web.archive.org/web/20090226000820/http://www.purple...
https://web.archive.org/web/20090225184613/http://www.purple...
I just checked now and it's one of those mattress drop-shipping sites :-(
brightbeige
I use http://neverssl.com as its replacement when checking internet connectivity.
dawnerd
I hope the original owner made a fortune from it and not had it taken via a trademark dispute.
dtech
I guess everyone has a price
indigodaddy
I believe this was one of, if not the first site to implement a barcode/UPC generator. Current iteration here:
dr_dshiv
This guy worked at Danger! Man I loved my Hiptop/Sidekick
oulipo2
The guy pretends he doesn't want to sell the website, all while hinting exactly at who might want to buy it and for how much... lol
Mistletoe
I think he’s aiming a bit high with 10 milly. I’d take 1 or 5.
Fade_Dance
If the milk marketing budget is truly 100 million a year (a cursory check shows it's likely closer to 200 million now) as he mentions, 10 million doesn't seem very high at all.
So they've had a 100 million per year marketing budget for at least 10 years. Let's say they spent 1% per year towards the domain... The opportunity cost for not having something as obvious and useful as milk.com seems significant. To me it seems like they've already made a mistake by not paying up despite having the means, and now they've dug their foot in. They've spent hundreds of millions on billboards, yet they can't even put "milk.com" on their billboards next to "got milk". Imo but 5% less billboards for a few years and buy the domain...
gdbsjjdn
The value isn't to the milk cartel, it's to alternative milk producers. Imagine an ad for a new oat milk with "milk.com" as the domain. It's got a ton of media value.
enlyth
In some countries you're not allowed to call them milk, for example, in the UK a judge ruled that they must be called something like "oat drink" instead.
curiousObject
It’s affected by how Google currently ranks the plain domain name in a search. It used to be higher than it is now, but it still has got a lot of weight
Mistletoe
Idk it seems like everyone knows about milk at this point, is milk.com vital? We buy our books at Amazon.com not books.com. And you wouldn’t even buy milk at milk.com it would just be info about milk.
Fade_Dance
I agree it sort of seems like a waste of money, but this is what they are doing year after year - spending money to promote milk. May as well stretch to have milk.com at that point if you plan on spending 100 mil a year for the foreseeable future on promotion. Then again, they've already blown through the entire old-school .com age without getting the domain, maybe they are better off just riding it out until web addresses are entirely irrelevant rather than just mostly irrelevant.
stevage
I'd love to have a job that I liked so much I'd keep doing it rather than cash out a domain name and retire.
gnfargbl
If you look through his LinkedIn [1], he was at Google from 2005-2011, as the tech lead for Dalvik, and spent some time as a Senior Staff Engineer at Slack. I would guess he can probably retire anytime he likes.
Agree that $10M is too high, but you have to drop your anchor somewhere.
alexharrisnyc
If you listen to the podcast, if I recall correctly, he said he’d consider numbers higher than 1m.
I'm going by ancient memory here and would love it if someone corrects me.