The Remarkable Untold Story Of The Domains USOpen.com And USOpen.org

I am once again watching the tennis US Open tournament, the last grand slam of the year. I am a big tennis fan and I watch as much as I can on TV despite the time difference between Greece and the United States. As I was watching the first semi-final I thought about why the tournament uses usopen.org as it’s official website and not usopen.com. Well there is a reason for that. Someone made the wrong choice.

Imagine it is the 13th of July 1995 and the United States Tennis Association decides to build a website and buys the domain usopen.org. Guess what happens 3 months later? The United States Golf Association buys the available for anyone to register usopen.com to host it’s US Open golf tournament. The United States Tennis Association could have registered both domains in July and the .net as well but it chose not to.

At the same date that the United States Golf Association registered the domain usopen.com, it also registered it’s acronym usga.org. Guess what? They didn’t register usga.com at that time but luckily for them it was still available 15 months later so they got it then.

The irony with the United States Tennis Association is that they should have known better even in 1995 and should have registered usopen.com. On February 1995, the United States Tennis Association bought their acronym usta.com. They bought the .com because the .org was taken! It was taken by the US Telecom Association which in turn made a mistake and didn’t register usta.com in 1994, the year it bought usta.org.

I guess this story goes on and on and continues until now. So if you don’t want other websites to feel sorry for you, then when you are starting a project, company, organization or simply your blog just register all the available domain names that are suitable for you. Don’t stall. If you are torn between 2 domains just register both. You will not regret spending that extra $10.

Why “feel sorry” you may ask? Take a look at the top of the usopen.com screenshot below from 2012:

This year there is no redirection anywhere to be found. How many visitors do you think usopen.org is loosing because of a bad choice?