McDonalds.com in 1994: A Reporter, a Burger Chain and a Brooklyn School

In 1994 a reporter telephoned McDonald's to ask why the company had no address on the internet. Jane Hulbert, who took the call in media relations, had a question of her own. "Are you finding that the internet is a big thing?" she asked him.

The reporter was Joshua Quittner, and before his article appeared, mcdonalds.com was registered with his name on the record. By his later account, the registration cost nothing. By February 1995, Time could report that McDonald's had agreed to pay to connect a New York public school to the internet in return for its own name.

Later retellings often treat the episode as a joke about a company that missed the future. The surviving documents tell a narrower and more useful story. They show a registration office too small to check names against trademarks. They show a corporation whose lawyer found no settled rule to lean on, and a settlement priced in help for a school at a time when, Quittner wrote, nobody knew what such a name was worth. They also disagree about what was given, and to which school.

The Fortune 500 had not looked up its own names

Quittner was a technology columnist at New York Newsday who also freelanced for Wired. In an oral history recorded years later for the Shorenstein Center's Riptide project, he said Kevin Kelly asked him to write about domain-name scalping.

The magazine had a simple test in mind. In May 1994 a Wired researcher compared the Fortune 500 with the registered names. Quittner reported that only one-third of the companies held an obvious version of their name, that 14 percent had lost theirs to someone else, and that more than half of the names were still open.

The office behind those records was small. Scott Williamson, who supervised registration at the InterNIC, told Quittner the staff amounted to 2.5 people. Requests had grown from 300 a month to more than 1,300 in a year. Williamson named two red flags: a name already taken, or an obvious attempt to take a name the applicant had no right to. He said Sprint had still obtained mci.com for a while through a registration mistake. He said he would need a staff of 20 to research every request, so trademark problems stayed with the person applying. Asked directly whether Quittner could register mcdonalds.com, he said nothing let him stop it and added that a policy was needed.

Registration was free, by Quittner's later account, though the applicant needed control of a host computer on the internet.

A media-relations call became a registration

Quittner's Wired article is built around his calls to Hulbert, and it calls her helpful. She tried to find someone at headquarters who could answer. When they finally spoke again, she apologized and said the voicemails she had left produced nothing. She suggested he might have to run the story without a comment from the company.

Quittner did not portray McDonald's as technically backward. He noted that it had been the first commercial user of ISDN and expected to run a commercial on America Online that August. In the oral history he called the company sophisticated. The gap he had found was smaller than the legend suggests. Nobody he could reach owned the question of the name.

Burger King had no address either. A company contact left him a voicemail saying the company was considering registration and had decided nothing.

The oral history adds a turn that the article does not show. Quittner recalled that his first draft ended with a remark that he ought to register the name himself. Kelly, he said, liked the story and told him to do it and rewrite the piece around the result. That is one person's memory many years later, and we found no document from 1994 that confirms it. If the memory is right, the registration became the reporting method at an editor's request.

Quittner wrote that he filled out the InterNIC's application form, which was available online. About two weeks later he received an email saying the registration was complete, and a WHOIS lookup showed his own name as administrative contact. Verisign's registry record today still gives July 12, 1994 as the registration date of mcdonalds.com, which fits his account of the timing.

A participant later complicated that record. On February 15, 1996, Brian Behlendorf, who set up wired.com in 1993, corrected a poster on the W3C's www-html mailing list and wrote that his own name was on the registration. He did not say in what role. Wired printed Quittner's name as administrative contact, and we found no archived WHOIS record from 1994 that settles the point. Quittner's remark about needing a host computer might explain a technical role for Behlendorf, but no source says so.

The article closed by asking readers what he should do with the name. He listed an auction, keeping it as a trophy, or a page explaining the difference between the company and himself. He directed suggestions to ronald@mcdonalds.com. The article ran in the October 1994 issue.

The mail kept arriving long after the story was over. Quittner recalled more than 1,500 messages that, he said, fell into two camps. One group told him to take McDonald's for all he could. The other wanted a website praising vegetarianism.

McDonald's called a trademark lawyer

David Maher was the company's outside trademark counsel, with an office in the Sears Tower. In a 2006 reminiscence published on CircleID, he wrote that he was reading the Wired article, the first issue he had ever received, when McDonald's rang him about it and told him to do something.

Maher's research left him with an uncomfortable answer. By his account, he saw such registrations as clear trademark infringements, yet he found no statutes on the subject and no court decisions, because the internet was too new. Bruce Keller, the trademark lawyer interviewed for the Wired article, had told Quittner that registration gave no right to use a conflicting name. That was a lawyer's reading, not a ruling.

Two law-journal articles from 1997 describe pressure before a settlement. Steven McAuley, citing a 1995 paper by Bruce P. Keller, wrote that McDonald's first pressed Network Solutions to revoke the registration. Gayle Weiswasser, citing the Arizona Republic of February 6, 1995, wrote that the company threatened to sue before it quietly gave way. Maher does not mention a threat. He says he urged a quiet settlement because a lawsuit was unlikely to end well for either side. The accounts can all be true at different moments, but the order of events is not documented in anything we could read.

The price was paid to a school

The accounts from the 1990s agree on the basic exchange. The name would go back if McDonald's helped a public school in New York. Weiswasser adds that Quittner was not after cash, and none of the accounts reports a payment to him. He told Time that the deal had moved two parties short of information into the group that had it. The accounts divide on the details.

The $3,500 figure has the best documented trail, because two articles reach it through different citations. Weiswasser ties the terms to Quittner's own Newsday column of October 7, 1994, and the payment to the Arizona Republic. McAuley cites Keller's paper. Later retellings, including Gizmodo's in 2014, repeat it. We could not read the column, the newspaper item or Keller's paper directly, so we rely on the journals' descriptions of them.

The earlier accounts point elsewhere. Time and Behlendorf both describe a high-speed line and give no amount, and Behlendorf wrote as a participant. The law articles give $3,500 and describe computer equipment. No source reconciles the two versions or says whether $3,500 would have covered such a line.

Maher's $5,000 comes from someone close to the deal, but he gives it as an approximation more than a decade afterward, and his memory is not exact elsewhere. He recalls Wendy's being mentioned as a possible buyer, and the Wired text names only Burger King. No source reconciles his figure with $3,500.

The school is harder. Time gives the only school name we found. A P.S. 308, the Clara Cardwell school, stands today in Bedford-Stuyvesant, and it teaches through grade 8. That fits both Weiswasser's neighborhood and Maher's Brooklyn, and it is our inference that they describe one school. No source we read connects the three directly. Behlendorf's high school is the outlier on grade level, although Time's special curriculum may point to a similar kind of school.

Two gaps remain. We found no record showing when the transfer took place, except that Time treated the agreement as done by February 1995. Weiswasser and Maher say the gift was made, and Behlendorf says the T1 was provided, but we found no school or company record of what was installed or how long it was used. McDonald's own statement of the terms, if one was issued, did not turn up either.

The address went home and the rules came later

Matt Novak of Gizmodo later reproduced, through the Wayback Machine, a graphic shown at mcdonalds.com in November 1996. The registry now lists the name with a corporate domain registrar and a set of locks against transfer, update and deletion.

Time introduced Quittner as a new hire in the same note that reported the deal. Maher wrote that the case started him on a new career. He became a founding co-chair of the International Trademark Association's Internet Subcommittee, and later took Quittner to lunch at the Four Seasons to thank him. Maher went on to spend years on domain-name policy.

McDonald's was never the only company with this problem in 1994. Quittner's article sets it beside the fights over mtv.com and kaplan.com, both already in dispute. Lawmakers and the internet's governance bodies took years to respond. The Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act and the UDRP both arrived in 1999, and Namefi Resources' explainer sets out how those two regimes draw the line today. This article takes no position on how either would have applied to Quittner's registration, which predates both by five years.

What the 1994 record does show is how a name was held at the time. In the InterNIC's records the registrant was whoever the entry named, and by Williamson's account the office screened for little beyond names already taken and obvious grabs. McDonald's had a famous mark, a trademark lawyer and every commercial reason to want the address. Quittner had filled in a form. For a few months that entry stood, and the way out was a negotiation. The price was not a market price. Quittner had asked in print what the name was worth, and had written that no one knew.

Hulbert could not find anyone at headquarters who could answer for the company's name. That remains the question to put to any company: who owns the name?

Sources and further reading

All links were fetched on 2026-11-03.

• Joshua Quittner, Wired — Billions Registered, October 1994. The primary account of the calls, the InterNIC figures and the registration.
• Elizabeth Valk Long, Time — To Our Readers, Feb. 13, 1995. The earliest account read for this article that names P.S. 308.
• Riptide, Shorenstein Center — Josh Quittner oral history. Quittner's later recollection of the assignment, the rewrite and the reader email. The interview page gives no date.
• David W. Maher, CircleID — Reporting to God, March 28, 2006. A recollection by McDonald's outside trademark counsel.
• Gayle Weiswasser — Domain Names, the Internet, and Trademarks: Infringement in Cyberspace, Santa Clara High Technology Law Journal, vol. 13, issue 1 (January 1997), pp. 151–152 and nn. 105–107 (PDF p. 16–17). Cites Quittner, "Life in Cyberspace: You Deserve a Break Today," Newsday, Oct. 7, 1994, at A5, and "Business Computing," Arizona Republic, Feb. 6, 1995, at E1. Neither cited item was read directly.
• Steven A. McAuley — The Federal Government Giveth and Taketh Away, 15 J. Marshall J. Computer & Info. L. 547 (1997), p. 558 and n. 59 (PDF p. 13). Cites Bruce P. Keller, Electronic Property Rights and Licensing On-line Uses of Intellectual Property, 421 PLI/Pat 7 (1995). The cited paper was not read directly.
• Brian Behlendorf, www-html mailing list — Re: Chuckle: McDonald.com, February 15, 1996. A participant's statement about the registration and the T1 line.
• MIT Technology Review — Brian Behlendorf. His role in setting up wired.com.
• Matt Novak, Paleofuture/Gizmodo — 5 Domain Name Battles of the Early Web, November 21, 2014.
• Verisign — RDAP record for mcdonalds.com. Registration date and current status.
• InsideSchools — P.S. 308 Clara Cardwell. Present-day location and grades. This page does not discuss the 1994 deal.