Lord of your domain

November 2004

You might reasonably think that a decade after the internet started to be widely known, all those amusing spats about name ownership would be ancient history. Not a bit of it.

Henry Maxwell, bespoke bootmakers to, among others, HM Queen Elizabeth II, discovered the problems of domain ownership earlier this year with henrymaxwell.com. The company failed to re-register it and when it expired it was bought by someone else. Now type henrymaxwell.com into your browser and you get redirected to a site whose robust content is more about booty than boots.

"We’re to blame really," says general manager Peter Martin, "we just weren’t interested enough and we let it lapse." This is, he explains, a real problem for smaller companies. Henrymaxwell.com had been registered through a third party which provided email and web services. But these were fairly expensive, so the business rather lost interest. And, when it lapsed, a pornographer jumped in and snapped it up.

Naturally they were aghast. But, says Martin, “There was nothing we could really do. We looked into getting it back but that was far too expensive." Luckily Henry Maxwell is not the company’s main brand (which is Foster and Son) nor does it do a huge amount of business over the internet. So they took it on the chin, dropped the .com, registered .co.uk and changed the stationery.