What Sex.com Has to Do With Facebook and Uber
The yearslong battle over the domain was proof that even shady characters could help make good web policy.
Illustration: Brandon Celi
Most of us think of the business leaders behind the modern internet as clean-cut, scientifically minded overachievers, such as Amazon.com’s Jeff Bezos, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, and Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin. But as David Kushner writes in The Players Ball: A Genius, a Con Man, and the Secret History of the Internet’s Rise, their arrival followed a tumultuous period when the web was a Wild West and less refined characters made fortunes by staking claims wherever and however they could.
The so-called genius in The Players Ball is Gary Kremen, a Stanford grad who gets his start as a teen selling stolen copies of Playboy. He’s so badly dressed and unsociable that he’s asked to leave his Goldman Sachs summer internship early. He doesn’t change much as an adult—living on burritos, attending meetings in dirty T-shirts, and not brushing his teeth.