Kenji forwards me his eloquent plea to Heng Zhong, who suggests $5,000 as an appropriate bounty. Like Perkins, Zhong refers to his “business” and to Kenji as someone who has willingly entered this exchange. I’ve noticed domainers often speak of “transactions” made and “deals” closed. This would be as adorable as a child pretending to have a tea party if the tea weren’t laced with arsenic. By Zhong’s logic, Kenji is at fault not only for letting his domain lapse but for undervaluing it with a low bid. Zhong also accuses him of having a “bad personality” and “something wrong with his brain.” Though this is somewhat understandable, given Kenji’s assertion that he’s renamed himself Heng Zhong and gone ahead and registered www.TheOtherHengZhongIsABottomFeedingLowlifeScumLeadingAnEmptyExistence.com.
Kenji suggests I speak to his friend, Daniel Feldeson, a Brooklyn-based composer, who’s had a similar experience. The Internet is littered with all kinds of domain horror stories but a healthy amount of them come from singers and guitarists. I am starting to wonder if musicians are somehow even worse at holding down their domains than authors, but this feels like rubbing salt in the wound.
“I was righteously indignant and deeply annoyed,” Daniel says, “just like you.”
Well, almost. The difference between Angel and Kenji and me and Daniel is that Daniel doesn’t feel this way toward the stranger who demanded $2,000 for his site—but toward GoDaddy.
“I felt like the company had done me this incredible disservice. It felt weird to sell my domain to a pirate when there’s really nobody else in the world who’d want it. It’s insane. There must be a better way.”
There’s not. I understand Daniel’s feelings, as they are my feelings. If Wesley Perkins can find me, why can’t my provider find me first? But barring global regulation of over 64 million sites, GoDaddy’s hands are tied. For one thing, their system works like a giant pawnshop. It’s uninterested in the origin story of that bloody Rolex. It can’t parse the difference between an available domain and a lost domain. For another, they are only complicit inasmuch as they have a department devoted to solving the problem. Companies like GoDaddy scale by removing human interaction, and, as Adam told me, the performance evaluations of the brokerage staff are based on their closure rate. The commission exists because, even if you’re in the right, someone has to come in to work and deal with you.
For now, the company has what it refers to as a “grace period.” This is the five stages it takes for your domain to die. While you’re walking around with this symptom-free but fatal disease, this is what’s happening: Between day one and day eighteen of expiration, everything can be reverted back to you without penalty. On day nineteen, your site is technically yours but only for an eighty-dollar redemption fee. A week later, your domain is officially put up for auction. This sounds dire, but you can still get it back, it’s just that now you’ve got a price sticker on your forehead. Ten days after that is when things get messy. The domain is listed in a closeout auction, at which point you have a forty-eight-hour window to reclaim your domain, regardless of the winning bid. That is, assuming you magically decided to stop ignoring six weeks of e-mails. But who among us swings by the emergency room for the heck of it? So now you’re dead, having graduated from purgatory to the aftermarket. And it is here all manner of ghouls await you.
*
Sixteen hours before we’re supposed to meet, Perkins pulls the plug. It’s unclear if he’s joking, but I did not fly 3,500 miles to eat a scone and go home. Not wanting him to know where I’m staying, I call him from my cell phone, which leads him to believe that I couldn’t possibly be in London. Once assured that I am, he expresses newfound concern that if I write about this, he will not be “painted in a positive light.” This, despite weeks of claiming he has never and will never care what people think of him. His concerns are not unfounded. But I tell him if he’s worried his job description will reflect poorly on him, he has bigger problems than me. I’m simply curious to know who he is and why he does this. Which, as it turns out, is the truth.
Perkins has begun exhibiting curious signs of humanity. He’s told me the story of the single mother who once called him, sobbing and destitute, so he gave her back her site on the spot. He says he chose to meet in London over his native Birmingham because there’s more for me to see here. He’s assigned himself the role of research assistant, suggesting people for me to talk to, cases to look up. He’s even sent me random closeout auction domains so that I can “save them from my same fate.” Among them are a country singer, a third-generation heating and cooling business, a wellness author, and a domestic-abuse hotline. He would call himself but he “sounds too much like a scammer” to be believed.
“So you’ve done this before?” I asked. “Tracked people down?”
“’Course I have.”
Now, as I pace and cajole, he wants to know how my “savior mission” went. I report that some people were grateful—though only moderately so, as it’s hard to grasp the emotional and financial consequences of letting your domain expire until it happens—and some never responded. Perhaps because “an urgent message regarding your domain” sounds about as unurgent as messages come. Or the timing was farcically bad. The heating and cooling company’s Web designer was on a cruise in the middle of the Atlantic. With the country singer, I wrote to his manager and his agent, to no avail. I tried to get to him through his Twitter profile, only to find a “Hey guys, taking a break from social media. Mental health!”
“You see?” Perkins asks, almost gleefully. “You get it now. Even if you’re trying to be a Good Samaritan, half the time it doesn’t work anyway.”
*
A pipe has burst in the pub Perkins selected, so we agree to meet outside. He is his profile picture come to life—forty-six, five nine, compact and quick-gestured. He grins when he spots me, an open smile that pokes into his cheeks. Yesterday’s trepidations seem to have melted away. He greets me warmly, kissing me on the cheek. He wants to make sure I accurately describe what he’s wearing: “I got on brand boots, slim-fit jeans, a muscle-fit T-shirt. Athletic build, would you say?” We proceed to speed-weave through the streets of Marylebone, a neighborhood with which he’s only marginally familiar, but Lesley wanted to do some shopping here (sexist but inevitable thought: her and whose money?). He’s concerned that another pub will be too loud. So we settle on a café, which is fine by Perkins because he doesn’t drink.
“If you hear my phone bleeping,” he warns me, “I’m bidding on domains.”
He winks. My face contorts like a baby’s, practicing amusement. I have never reminisced with someone about the time they took my money and my identity. He orders a soda and thanks me for earning him an unexpected $4,800 yesterday. What $4,800? I am as confused as he wants me to be. Apparently, while we spoke on the phone last night, Perkins was in the midst of negotiations. Panicked by the silence, the domain’s rightful owner increased his bid to meet Perkins’s asking price.
“So really I have to thank you, Sloane. You did that.”
My stomach turns. Perkins’s second-favorite activity after domain acquisition is needling me. (When I informed him that I’d be staying with a friend, I got a “You have friends?” in return.) He seems to be waiting for a “You’re welcome.” I change the subject. Perkins is self-taught, having stumbled into his current revenue stream by accident four years ago. He’s an “online trader” and was looking for an expired domain for himself, one that had some traffic already, when he came across unitedfinancial.org. He bought it, but it turned out the credit union wanted it back. So Perkins sold it to them for a cool $15,000.
“That’s still the highest domain sale I ever done. I tend to keep it just under 10K. It’s sort of like psychology. I’ve found that if you keep it under 10K, it gives people hope. So if you give ’em a carrot at 9.7K, yeah? They think they can get it at 5K. And if we do a deal at 5K, I’m happy because I’ve only paid a few hundred and they’re happy because they’ve gotten a good price.”
I search my memory for a time I’ve felt “happy” since this happened. Nope. Nothing.
Soon Perkins was trolling auction sites for nearly expired domains. He prefers fishing for preexisting domains over squatting on ones he suspects might be valuable, so he set the parameters for an algorithm to do just that. Perkins has a nemesis in the form of a domainer in LA called Scarface (“Me and him hammer away at it all the time”). He’s written Scarface in the hopes of teaming up since they’re costing each other thousands of dollars a year but Scarface is a lone wolf. No matter, Perkins knows his algorithm is better. It doesn’t just search for traffic, but for the status of a site, organic traffic, and, most crucially, the duration of ownership. Perkins claims not to target individuals, but his algorithm is a heat-seeking missile for personal domains. We look like what we are—people who have lost something and will want it back. By his own admission, celebrities and corporations “tend to have enough people looking that someone always warns ’em before I get there.”
“Your problem,” he concludes, “is that you’re not more famous.”
“Yes, that’s definitely my problem.”
“And what the hell were you using Hotmail for? You deserve to lose your site just for that.”
Perkins slaps the table and laughs. He may have the moral center of a Cadbury Creme Egg but he’s also starting to sound like every single one of my friends.
“You just gotta ask yourself,” he levels with me, “how do you value your brand? Some people think no, I’m not giving him the money, because they want to make a stance, but the stance can harm their business. And hey, I lose a lot. Sometimes I’m buying twenty domains at a time and spending two thousand dollars, yeah? It’s like being in a casino. You know when your number drops in and you’re like ‘Yes!’? That’s what it feels like. But what happens if I don’t sell anything? You start to get on the brink. It’s highly risky.”
Perkins sees himself as a casualty of his chosen profession, which is a bit like a cat burglar becoming irate because he threw out his back scaling your building. But this is the reasoning required to do his job. He loses money. He gets threatened. People have vowed to hunt him down and cut his throat. Even so, I can tell that it takes such extremes for him to register contact as anything but further proof that humanity is divided into chumps and not chumps. There are countless ways to divide the world in two. Gender, religion, nut allergies. But Perkins does some of the more cynical line-drawing I’ve ever witnessed. When I tell him as much, he says he doesn’t see it that way. Not at all. In fact, he thinks he’s providing a service.
“Listen,” he says, leaning in close. “The domain could end up in someone’s hands who’s bad. Some of these mega-rich domainers, they won’t even sell you the domain back, yeah? They use it for traffic or adverts. At least I’m giving people the opportunity to buy it back.”
This steal-from-the-rich, sell-to-the-poor policy ebbs and flows. Perkins cops to the real reason he sometimes contacts domain owners at the last minute—and it’s not because he’s trying to be an upstanding citizen. It’s because he “got carried away” in an auction and would rather those people purchased their sites back before he has to pay for them. I am visibly disappointed but, as Perkins points out, the calculus cuts both ways. The real reason he redirects personal sites to pornographic ones is not so nefarious as it seems. It’s so he can turn a profit while he waits for the original owner to pony up the cash. And should the flashes of asses expedite the process? All the better.
Plus, as he is quick to remind me, it’s all perfectly legal. I posit the idea that legality and morality don’t always overlap. There are a lot of bad things in this world that are perfectly legal. Laws are created by man and man is fallible. He shrugs. He has my money and I don’t so he’s more or less done with this particular debate.
“The interesting thing,” he muses, “is there seems to be a lot of personal sites now. A lot of what I call ‘love me’s. You know, the girls who love themselves and it’s all ‘I’m this, I’m that, blah blah blah,’ because they watch too much TV and they get caught up in their own lives and they all think they’re Kim Kardashian.”
I know exactly of what he speaks, having screenshotted an Instagram feed or two in my time and texted it to a like-minded friend. But I am unwilling to turn my back on my own gender in his presence. Perkins concedes that there are exceptions to the rule. Like his own daughter, a college student with her own lifestyle and fashion site. He set it up for her—and nearly let it expire.
“Can you believe it? Bad! I know. But I have thousands of ’em.”
“Does she know what you do for a living?”
“She just knows I do something with domains. The thing you have to understand, yeah? Is that this is all a simple business transaction. I don’t do nothing to people. If you value your entire business at five hundred dollars, then it’s time to close your doors. It’s a self-inflicted lesson.”
Talking to Perkins is like talking to a perfectly reasonable person until, only when he turns to the side, you see a little chunk of his head is missing. Because he’s not wrong—not a bastion of ethics, but not wrong. He’s taking advantage of a deeply flawed system. If you lose a watch and I buy it for cheap at a flea market and then wind up selling it back to you on eBay, well, I can sleep at night knowing I’ve done that. Chances are I’m not just giving it back. What bothers me is the idea of doing it every day, intentionally combing the world for lost watches until I am an expert watch reseller and, more frighteningly, an expert sleeper. Until people are not people but watches with wrists still in them. I suggest that Perkins could be doing something else with his time—he has an eye for the stock market, a certain charm and, clearly, Web experience—but he shakes his head no. He likes the thrill of this too much. Plus, he thinks he’s hungrier for it than most.
“I’m not like these domainer guys who do this who are from rich backgrounds. I’m more from the streets. And I do think other people have more money than me. I mean, take you. You live in New York. Your apartment costs three million dollars.”
At this, I can’t help but smile. Between him and GoDaddy, I paid over two months’ rent to get back something I owned and made. This wasn’t a medical expense or an airfare change fee, both infuriating but both the price of living life. In this case, I just set the money on fire. Until I am on the ransom end of an actual hostage situation, this will be the most painful expense I ever have. And let’s say I did live in a three-million-dollar apartment. That wouldn’t mean I deserved this. But if there’s one business Perkins and I have both willingly entered, it’s the business of being an adult. In the end, it is not my place to convince him what he’s doing is wrong any more than it’s his to convince me that it isn’t.
“You think I should feel guilty,” he says, as we leave the café. “I never feel guilty. If I was rich, maybe I’d keep the algorithm going and set up a charity and tell all these people to donate to some cause instead of paying me.”
He smiles, running a simulation of this alternate future in which he is lauded for what he does. I tell him I’m not sure that would work. People don’t donate to charity under duress.
“Oh, trust me,” he says, holding the door open, “they would.”
Our Hour Is Up
I somehow make it to the fourth grade without ever seeing the Peanuts comic strip. So I don’t know that I’m imitating Lucy when I put signs up all over my elementary school, advertising my services as a therapist. In puffy paint and Magic Marker, I inform my peers that every Tuesday I will station myself on the large rock that dominates the northwest quadrant of the playground and anyone who likes can come and ask me for advice. I know what you’re thinking: Why Tuesdays? Because Monday is too loaded, Friday is not loaded enough, Thursday is charged with anticipation for Friday, and Tuesday is essentially a less popular version of Wednesday. And “less popular” is exactly where I belong.
There are kids who go through elementary school having no friends whatsoev
er. But between parent and teacher pressure for harmony, this is actually tough to manage. It generally requires hygiene issues or the regular cutting of one’s own bangs. I am the kid just above that rung, the one with a handful of friends. Scraped together, there are just enough of them for me to suspect that if they have sought my nine-year-old wisdom at bowling parties, perhaps I can be of use to the population at large. Because I have the brain of a small child, it does not occur to me to charge for this service.
The Monday before I open this not-for-profit juggernaut, I am pulled out of class by the principal. This is beyond shocking to everyone, including the teacher, including me. At this point in my life, my greatest infraction has been forgetting my recorder on a school bus. My heart races as I try to imagine what I could possibly have done.
It seems that I did not have permission to tape posters up all over the place, and if I had asked, I would have been informed that the entire school had just been freshly repainted. Now there are bits of colored construction paper embedded in the walls. It will be years before I do the calculus on how much it costs to repaint an entire public school and where that money comes from. For now, it doesn’t seem like a very big deal. Perhaps the principal should bore someone else with her list of chores. I apologize but my real concern is that my therapeutic practice is getting off to an inauspicious start.
The good news is that word has spread that I was pulled out of class and why. This is the moment in which I learn that all publicity is good publicity. Or, well, I learn the adage. On Tuesday, when the lunch bell rings, I march past the tire swings and the monkey bars and climb up onto the rock like a Buddha in a jean jacket. At first, business is slow. It’s just me and my best pal, chatting. She is the human equivalent of the pianist’s own money in the tip jar. But soon enough, people we don’t know as well come around and she excuses herself to apply stickers to her backpack.
During my first recess, I have four customers. Their problems stem mostly from one another. One day, licensed therapists will tell them that their problems stem mostly from their parents, but that day has not yet come. For now, it’s all Suzy-is-mean-to-me and Danny-stole-my-gummy-bears. There’s a fifth customer, at the end of the hour, but he only asks me a question about the dearth of strawberry milk in the cafeteria. I can’t decide if he doesn’t understand what I’m doing here or I don’t.
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