I miss web indexes. It felt much more like an act of discovery to drill down to a topic I might not have otherwise been interested in to find some gem of a web page, and then to check that pages links and webrings. It always gives me joy to come across one, even if all the pages on it are long abandoned.
Reliving that is one of my favorite things about the wayback machine, usually starting from one of the big sites that indexed many topics, but the web-rings and obscure personal link collections are rarely more than a few clicks away from there.
I used to work for an IoT startup that really wanted the domain mq.tt. And in that era, Trinidad and Tobago's national domain administrator would only conduct business in-person, and required payment by international money order.
A facilitator was found, a deal was negotiated, and then the lawyers got involved and went "no way in hell will we let the company's primary domain renewal rely on someone walking a money order into an office in Trinidad". C'est la vie
That's a real bold move, climate-wise. It's an island whose highest point is about 200 feet (65 metres) above sea level, and it's smack-dab in the middle of the hurricane highway...
Yes, to answer my own question like an adult, some did!
Vince Cate moved there to work on export-banned crypto, renouncing his citizenship and would start an ISP on the island after the banks rejected his electronic money ideas. This could have been PayPal in another timeline? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vince_Cate
the e-Gold people met there on an occasion, and Robert Hettinga and MIT researcher Rafael Hirschfield started the International Conference on Financial Cryptography in Anguila. https://news.ai/ref/crypto98.html
ai was also one of the ccTLDs that had an MX record for a long time, and I believe (although never had reason to confirm) actually used it. foo@ai tended to be a fun test case for e-mail validation.
The lengths the Cook Islands have to go to prevent folks from registering profanity is entertaining (there was a spate of .co.ck novelty names before they locked it down)
https://web.archive.org/web/19961017235908/http://www2.yahoo...
https://web.archive.org/web/19990125094806/http://www.direct...
A facilitator was found, a deal was negotiated, and then the lawyers got involved and went "no way in hell will we let the company's primary domain renewal rely on someone walking a money order into an office in Trinidad". C'est la vie
While I too would prefer it, I realize it is an idealist fantasy at this point.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebAI
Now it looks like restaurant adverts. Maybe not much happens there any longer.
Didn't some of the cypherpunks move out to anguila to avoid the crypto export bans during the first crypto wars?
Vince Cate moved there to work on export-banned crypto, renouncing his citizenship and would start an ISP on the island after the banks rejected his electronic money ideas. This could have been PayPal in another timeline? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vince_Cate
the e-Gold people met there on an occasion, and Robert Hettinga and MIT researcher Rafael Hirschfield started the International Conference on Financial Cryptography in Anguila. https://news.ai/ref/crypto98.html
So not in droves but it was a place, as it were.
https://www.ck/
Nathan Barley is a great watch. It also has one of my favourite terms for a mobile phone “hand held twit machine” (pre smartphones)