Fifteen years of email, sold out from under the family for $500,000 — with zero notice, mid-financing
This is Jonathan Hare's account, with its provenance shown. The person or organization named has not yet claimed or corrected it.
For fifteen years, jonathan@hare.com was Jonathan Hare's primary address — the one running through the 2004–2009 correspondence in this record's ledger (S-116, S-117, S-122, S-124) — leased, along with the whole family's addresses, from a company he recalls as NetIdentity, which had aggregated surname domains. Then the UK's William Hare Group bought the domain for $500,000, and one day the email simply stopped working: zero notice, in the middle of a financing push. The terms of service, as Hare recalls them, said the domain would never be sold; they could not refuse that much money. The purchaser bought a domain lawfully — the grievance, as recorded, lies with the lessor's promise.
The aftermath is the better story. Hare called Esther Dyson — the first Chairman of ICANN — who put him directly through to the sitting President and CEO, Rod Beckstrom. There was nothing Beckstrom could do, and he was right: ICANN controls the root servers, not .com issuance. What the episode actually produced was a renewed friendship, and a permanent lesson the architecture already teaches: identity you lease from someone else's promise is identity you do not own — which is, precisely, the problem Universal Ownership exists to end.
There is no single root. This is one view of the graph, from this node — what you see depends on where you enter and what you are looking for.
The ICANN chief who could do nothing about hare.com — correctly — and became a friend anyway
Open →made the call happenPC Forum's convenor; a longtime champion and investor across Hare's companies; the corridor personified
Open →Everything above is a distillation. The primary source is published in full, so that any claim on this page can be walked back to what was actually said — and where the two differ, the source governs.
This entry is deliberately incomplete. The gaps below are the things only certain people can settle — and settling one is a contribution like any other: recorded, timestamped and attributed to whoever made it.
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