This Site Almost Had the .com. Someone's Been Sitting on It Since 2014.
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.
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 January 24, 2014.
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 2014, and the answer hasn't changed much. 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: ICANN Lookup, Wayback Machine (2014), Wayback Machine (2025).
