Why the heck does Yahoo! own wp.com?

Factual Questions
1

www.wp.com should logically point to the Washington Post website. Right? Or at least something with the initials W.P. But instead it sends you to the “Yahoo! More Yahoo!” page – which is just a random collection of Yahoo! pages, none of which have a “W” or a “P” involved.

So anyone have any ideas why Yahoo! owns what would seem to be a fairly valuable domain?

2

Because it’s a fairly valuable domain. They’re hoping that someone will try to buy it at some point in the future.

3

Wrong.

Why the Washington Post and not William Percy or any other business that uses “WP”? Do a search on Yahoo and see how many businesses use “WP” as either a name or acronym. Better yet, do a search of trademarks on USPTO.gov and see all the valid trademarks for “WP”. These include but are not limited to the Washington Post.

Domain name registration is first come, first served, at least for the COM TLD. If I have a name you want, you can either

  1. demonstrate a trademark infringment (not the case with WP since it just forwards to Yahoo), or
  2. demonstrate that it was registered in bad faith (usually done by showing that the registrant tried to extort money from the trademark holder, not the case if Yahoo never offered it for sale), or
  3. buy it.

I, for one, hope we never get to a point where domain names are distributed based on what the majority of users think should be the logical registrant. The beauty of the web is that anyone can get a good name, stake out a site, and compete with the big boys. If you say the big boys should get any name they want, you’ve just destroyed the egalitarian basis of the web. Granted, Yahoo versus Washington Post is not a David v. Goliath situation, but that’s not the point. Domain squatting is also not the point since it’s not clear that Yahoo doesn’t have a valid reason for that domain. I happen to have a number of domain names with no active site, either because they’re for pending projects or because they’re used for mail or other network services that don’t include a web site. None of my names infringe on any trademarks and there’s not a shred of bad faith in my plans, so I’d resent any attempts to yank my domains and hand them over to the more “logical” owner.