Book Review: Sex.com by Kieren McCarthy

Filed under Books, Domains, Porn

This is easily the funnest tech industry book I’ve read in a long time.

The premise, in a nutshell: in the early 1990s an entrepreneur called Gary Kremen registered the domain name sex.com. It was subsequently stolen by an absolute bastard called Stephen Cohen, who quickly creates a multimillion dollar porn empire.

The book Sex.Com tells the story of Kremen’s long legal fight to get it back, and the increasingly personal and bitter hostilities between him and Cohen.

The genre is essentially courtroom drama, which could have very easily led to a very dry legal tome on the controversies of internet property rights during the early days of internet governance. McCarthy is now officially an ICANN policy wonk, so I had feared the book would veer in that direction.

But I’m delighted to say that he instead chooses to focus on the far more entertaining human story of two men who start off as strangers and quickly come to realize they really, really fucking hate each other. These are two men where a series of taunting telephone calls could easily and in fact does (if only in the paranoid ravings of the vanquished) culminate in a gun battle in a Tijuana suburb between a gang of bounty hunters and the Mexican police.

As such, McCarthy gives short shrift to the weighty legal issues at the heart of the case, briefly but competently dealing with each only insofar as they are necessary to advance the narrative. He’s far more interested in the people story. More attention is paid to the fact that Kremen’s lawyer is also his coke buddy and quite possibly on a parallel spiral of self-destruction. His pony-tail, which appears to irk the judge, is judged weightier than the contents of the motions he files.

One of the joys of reading Sex.com are the bizarre yet completely matter-of-fact passages that would be utterly out of place in any other industry books: “Kremen had recovered one of the three trucks that had driven off with the house’s possessions, handing over a wad of cash to a Mexican in a car park, no questions asked. But his big mistake was to put an old junkie friend in charge of fixing the place up.”

McCarthy’s either done a considerable amount of homework or he’s taking massive liberties with his assertions, often tossing around casual insults about protagonists and minor characters alike. Cohen, we learn early on, is chiefly motivated by “his unending, pubescent desire for uncomplicated, disconnected sex”. His fifth wife Rosa, who barely needs to appear in the story, McCarthy is quite comfortable telling us is “not very bright”.

It would be a mistake to say that McCarthy has written a black-and-white story about a good guy versus a bad guy. While Cohen is quite clearly presented as an evil bastard, it’s quite difficult not to admire his cojones and almost comic-book amorality, and to enjoy the occasional guilty chuckle when he does something for apparently no other purpose that to distract, confuse, or just generally fuck with, his opponents.

Kremen, clearly the nicer of the two, is portrayed sympathetically but by no means heroically. McCarthy makes his drug problems a central theme, and the book turns out to be as much about his battle with his internal demons as with his external tormentor.

Sex.com is primarily a very entertaining story about two guys having decade-long fight, but it’s also impossible not to learn a little something about the domain name industry along the way.

Not as much as I would have liked, however. We learn almost nothing about why Network Solutions (now the VeriSign registry) allowed the sex.com theft to occur in the first place and then continued to insist that it had done nothing wrong.

There was almost certainly a parallel people story going on inside NSI at the time, but we don’t hear anything about it, other than the fact that a number of rather controversial allegations were made, but filed under seal.

It’s damn shame. McCarthy is certainly privy to the same rumors as I, and yet he apparently failed to confirm them to the extent that he felt comfortable publishing. That was disappointing, but it did not detract from my overall enjoyment of the book.

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2007-07-28  ::  Kevin Murphy