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:

Apeel's Grape Seed Coating Once Kept Six in Ten American Supermarket Avocados From Spoiling. Then the Internet Found the Safety Data Sheet for a British Degreaser Also Called Apeel.

Apeel Sciences began in 2012 with a $100,000 grant from the Gates Foundation, awarded to a materials scientist named James Rogers to reduce the amount of food that rots between the farm and the plate in countries without reliable refrigeration. A second grant of about $1 million followed in

A Texas Power Company Charged $9.99 a Month to Let Customers Pay Exactly What the Wholesale Market Paid. In February 2021 the Market Paid $9,000 a Megawatt-Hour, and Griddy Drafted It Straight From Their Accounts.

Griddy Energy, a small Houston company that launched in 2017, sold Texans a simple idea. Most households in the state's deregulated electricity market pay a retailer a fixed rate, and the retailer carries the risk that wholesale power will cost more than it charged. Griddy removed the retailer&

Australia Paid Up to $1,600 a Home in 2009 to Insulate a Million Ceilings in a Year, Using Installers Who Signed Up Online. Its First Industry Meeting Heard New Zealand Had Tried This and Three People Electrocuted Themselves.

On 3 February 2009 Kevin Rudd announced the Energy Efficient Homes Package, part of a $42 billion stimulus plan meant to carry Australia through the global recession. Its centrepiece, the Home Insulation Program, offered free ceiling insulation worth up to $1,600 a home, with a target of 2.2

Subway Told Australian Customers Its Footlong Was a Trademark Name, Not a Measurement of Length. The US Trademark Board Ruled It Was a Measurement of Length and Refused Subway the Trademark.

In January 2013 Matt Corby, a teenager in Perth, bought a Subway Footlong and, as the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit would later put it, "for reasons unknown, decided to measure it." It was 11 inches long. He photographed it next to a tape

Read more

Apeel's Grape Seed Coating Once Kept Six in Ten American Supermarket Avocados From Spoiling. Then the Internet Found the Safety Data Sheet for a British Degreaser Also Called Apeel.

A Texas Power Company Charged $9.99 a Month to Let Customers Pay Exactly What the Wholesale Market Paid. In February 2021 the Market Paid $9,000 a Megawatt-Hour, and Griddy Drafted It Straight From Their Accounts.

Australia Paid Up to $1,600 a Home in 2009 to Insulate a Million Ceilings in a Year, Using Installers Who Signed Up Online. Its First Industry Meeting Heard New Zealand Had Tried This and Three People Electrocuted Themselves.

Subway Told Australian Customers Its Footlong Was a Trademark Name, Not a Measurement of Length. The US Trademark Board Ruled It Was a Measurement of Length and Refused Subway the Trademark.