Goatse.cx Is For Sale

fm6 writes "The domain goatse.cx is being auctioned. Bidding, at the time of posting, has reached $15K after 109 bids (with 6 days to go). Some of you will recall that this site used to be linked in a lot of Slashdot articles, despite having only a few pages. Boing Boing, with their usual creativity, has managed to depict Goatse's most commonly linked photo while still remaining within the bounds of good taste."

Re:its bad enough

[mushadv]

Like it or not, it's internets history. It's especially relevant to /. for the reason you stated (trolling).

Re:its bad enough

[suv4x4]

Sadly goatse is part of the history of the internet.

You'll be surprised how many people, making millions on the Internet, have no clue what it is. The people familiar in details with all the shock sites are a certain subculture, and certainly doesn't make up the history of the Internet.

.cx domains are worthless

[Anonymous Coward]

Goatse was a culturally significant internet meme and the domain was suspended (revoked) because some kook at the registrar found the content tasteless. There's plenty of content I find tasteless online, Goatse was nowhere near as offensive to me as the GWB presidency yet I'm not about to start pressuring ICANN to withdraw the domains registered by pro-bush news sites.

Dot cx (now CIIA) set a dangerous precedent in revoking the goatse domain, content regulation via DNS is nothing more than an abuse of power. cx domains are worthless, the registry has established it will pull domains if they don't like the content. Avoid.

Re:Unfair

[Dogtanian]

Anyone else finds it pretty unfair that the registrar took the domain back from its owner, then allows someone else to buy it for hundreds of dollars? Pretty close to stealing if you ask me.

If they did it once, they can do it again. Why would I want to pay out tens of thousands of dollars for a site when that could happen?

Even if I got that money returned, I'd assume that someone willing to spend that amount of money would have spent more money on, or be receiving more income from the site which they *wouldn't* get back.

Re:its bad enough

[Mr. Underbridge]

it's bad enough when someone does a first post to goatse.cx, why the heck is this making news? internet shock sites should not be posted on popular forums, it's stupid, why do we get a news article about shock sites

Methinks thou doth protest too much. That's really your ass in the picture, isn't it?

i always thought the /. community of moderators were a little more mature.

That's a joke, right?

Re:its bad enough

[linvir]

The people familiar in details with all the shock sites are a certain subculture, and certainly doesn't make up the history of the Internet.

As I understand it, back in the early days of the internet, the kind of enthusiasts who make up today's subculture were a significant proportion of the userbase. Just by being there, they were a target market, and helped the whole thing to grow. Just because AOL came along and reduced them to a subculture doesn't mean they aren't part of the internet's history.

And besides, who cares about the internet's ability to concentrate even more wealth into even fewer hands? I can guarantee that in 300 years, the history teachers won't be telling their classes about how the internet was really profitable and made a select few very rich. They'll tell of how it connected the world and got us all communicating at an unprecedented level (assuming they even mention it at all).

Sure, the signal-to-noise ratio sucks, and half the time all we're communicating is a picture of a guy stretching his ass with his hands, but at least that's more interesting than some dotcom's record quarterly report.

No one is paying

[mangu]

It has now become a contest of who is able to write the largest number. I tried bidding 9!!!!!!!!! just to see if they understand what a factorial is, but it required me to log in. I'm not going to create a fake account just for that lame joke.

Anyhow, there's a good moral lesson here. The .cx domain registrars revoked the site name just because they didn't like its content. Now who would want to buy a domain name they can lose anytime at the registrar's whim? As in any business, there is a question of trust here, if you can't trust the registrar the domain is worthless.

Besides, it's not as if there didn't exist plenty of sick sites [google.com] out there. I don't like those, but who am I to judge? As long as it's nothing criminal, let it be...

Money != Knowledge

[Cid Highwind]

You'll be surprised how many people, making millions on the Internet, have no clue what it is.

The people "making millions on the Internet" right now tend to be pornographers, spammers, scammers, and botnet owners. They probably don't know anything about Vint Cerf, ARPAnet, the IETF, or BBN either...

Re:What's it worth?

[archeopterix]

I can't see a large opening for sites with names like this.

I believe there is a wide gap between your assessment and the market value.