Meet the new Sex.com! Same as the old Sex.com!
So, you remember that whole thing about Sex.com, the URL fraudulently obtained by forged documents and used to generate briefcases of lettuce then invested in “a Mexican shrimp farm, a Tijuana strip club called the Bolero, and a Napster-like file-sharing site operating out of the Gaza Strip?”
I bet you do! I’m not even hinting at the sleaze this URL attracted; it is the shit magnet to shit on all shit magnets. The case has not one but two books written about it. One is Kieren McCarthy‘s Sex.com; the other is The Sex.com Chronicles by lawyer Charles Carreon.
Well, anyway, this sticky (or is that slimy?) URL got sold again. In March of this year the company owning it was forced into involuntary Chapter 11 Bankruptcy, ba-da-bing, ba-da-boom.
The New York Daily News says the frosty $13 million sale price is a record; plenty of other sources say the price the last time it changed hands was $14 million, back in ought-six. Reuters and The Register say it was $14 million in The Six. NYDN says the 2006 price (to Escom LLC) was $11.5 million. Turns out the $14 million price, which was widely reported as the highest price paid for a domain, was erroneous — this according to the company that completed this auction. In a massaged release yesterday, they said the 2006 price was the $11.5 million figure, not $14 million.
I mean, it’s all pink by candlelight, if you catch my meaning, but, you know, a million here, a million there…sooner or later you have to hit the ATM for some Dot Com Industry Food Stamps, right? Am I right?
Regardless, this year’s buyer was Clover Holdings, a company registered in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, a country generally regarded as one of the more controversial tax havens — though Wikipedia is curiously silent on that subject. I’m just glad this highly respectable URL is back on the straight and narrow and into the hands of a respectable company that I can’t seem to find on the internet.