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