Isn’t this a very common phrase? Surely, someone already thought about this?
Money.
The same way they got “meta”: money.
Considering it was registered in 1995 (https://www.whois.com/whois/threads.com) you are correct in thinking that it should have already been registered.
However you can sell (transfer) a domain to others if you wish, which is probably what meta did.
You just know someone bought that domain hoping to turn it into a gangbusters online clothes retailer and the best they could manage to do is camp on it and sell it.
Could’ve been Bezos, instead was a bozo.
Were they a bozo, though? If they sold that domain to FB, there is a great chance they just banked like gangbusters.
I suppose it depends on your outlook. I’d rather have had the passive income over time paid in stock options that multiply in value that I can get interest free loans against to file tax losses than the one time payout you have to pay gains on.
Hindsight is 20/20
Edit to add: there’s also a non zero chance that Meta swooped in like Disney did to Central Florida, set up a secret shell company to buy the property under value so no one knows what big business is behind the acquisition.
If you’re interested, you can see the past snapshots of thread.net in the wayback machine. This one from 2016: https://web.archive.org/web/20160111175229/http://thread.net/
Old primary word domains like this can cost millions to acquire.
Isn’t this something else though? Meta’s is .net isn’t it? So even they couldn’t get the .com…
edit: Indeed it’s nothing to do with Meta, though it seems kinda related. Bit surprised Meta went with the name actually.
Yeah, and if they could stop using established terms for their BS like “Metaverse” that would be great.
How does Microsoft justify having apps called “Teams” and “Code”?