Investigations

This Site Almost Had the .com. Someone's Been Sitting on It for decades.

We went looking for the nicer version of our own domain name. We found a Network Solutions error page that hasn't changed in over a decade, and a 'Coming Soon' banner that's been coming soon since 2025.

Wenceslaus Hollar, "The Dog in the Manger," 17th century. Public domain.

When we picked a name for a website about the small, cumulative ways people ruin things for each other, the obvious address was whywecanthavenicethings.com. It was already taken. It has been taken since, atleast, 2009.

According to the registry record, whywecanthavenicethings.com is registered through Network Solutions, LLC, currently locked against transfer, and set to expire January 24, 2027 — which means whoever holds it has renewed the registration something like a dozen times now, on purpose, one annual fee at a time. This is not a domain someone forgot about. Forgetting doesn't auto-renew.

So what's actually being protected so diligently? The Wayback Machine has been checking in periodically since 2009, and the answer hasn't changed much. Sanpshots from 2009 show a message, that the site has been hacked. Snapshots from 2014 and 2018 both show the identical generic stub: "Error. Page cannot be displayed. Please contact your service provider for more details." By 2025 the site got what passes for an upgrade — a Sedo-powered parking placeholder reading "This Page Is Under Construction – Coming Soon!," the domain-investment industry's version of a note taped to a shuttered storefront.

Checking it ourselves today changes nothing. Load it over plain HTTP and you get the same error stub. Try HTTPS and the connection doesn't even complete — the TLS handshake fails outright. Twelve years of continuous ownership, and the place still can't manage to securely display nothing.

Somewhere there's a person, or more likely a spreadsheet in a domain-investment portfolio, that has paid Network Solutions annually for over a decade to make sure nobody else can have this address either. Nobody's using it. Nobody's selling it that we can find. It isn't being developed, and it isn't quite being abandoned. It's just being withheld — indefinitely, on principle, from everyone including its own owner. Which is, if you squint, the whole thesis of this website, running quietly in the background as a single unresolved domain registration.

Filed from public reporting:

A Hand-Tightened Blind Flange and a Botched Shift Handover Killed 167 Men on Occidental Petroleum's Piper Alpha Platform in 22 Minutes. No One at the Company Was Ever Criminally Charged.

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Netflix Spent Six Years Telling Customers Love Is Sharing a Password. Once It Started Charging $7.99 a Month Per Shared Password Instead, Subscriber Growth Hit Its Best Year Since the Pandemic.

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A Hand-Tightened Blind Flange and a Botched Shift Handover Killed 167 Men on Occidental Petroleum's Piper Alpha Platform in 22 Minutes. No One at the Company Was Ever Criminally Charged.

Netflix Spent Six Years Telling Customers Love Is Sharing a Password. Once It Started Charging $7.99 a Month Per Shared Password Instead, Subscriber Growth Hit Its Best Year Since the Pandemic.

New York Paused Congestion Pricing for 'Affordability' Weeks Before a 2024 Election, Then Relaunched It at a Lower Price Once Voting Was Over. A Year Later, Traffic Was Down 11 Percent and the Federal Government Was Still in Court Trying to Kill It.

Twitter Cut Off the Third-Party Apps That Built Its Developer Ecosystem in January 2023 With No Warning. One of Those Apps Coined the Word Tweet and Designed Twitter's Bird Logo Before Twitter Had Either.