Dear Matt Mullenweg,

I have been a big admirer of you for your incredible contributions to the world wide web. WP in particular has allowed my ancient Dad to post about his shitty political views to an audience of no one for about 5 years now, and he has never asked me for help. It is a godsend.

For all the generosity from your open-sourcing ventures with Automattic and the involved nature of your philanthropy, there is one unfortunate nuisance—admittedly a rather minor one—you have caused to a chunk of the worlds population, by way of your "matt" domain monopoly.

Of course, you are known for your ma.tt website. But what any Matt who has been on the hunt for a domain name will have realised is that essentially all publicly available "matt" domains are gone. All 192 of your matt.* sites are detailed by Matt Stancliff in his article "What The Matt?".

They all seemingly redirect to the aforementioned blog of yours, serving no purpose. It would be understandable if you had plans for a few extra domains, but I cannot foresee the use of a dozen... let alone nearly two hundred!

It isn't strictly something to fault you on. I get it—domain names are snagged by some trolling individual or corporation and dangled out to sell for ridiculous returns. Your name/brand/persona is being a Matt, and it might as well be be engraved to the very fabric of the World Wide Web that it is so.

But the purpose of so many TLDs is to offer some choice and flexibility for folk, if at least to curtail the bad faith ownership of domains (Tim Berners-Lee infact regrets the DNS service because of this outcome). For anyone called Matt who wants an online presence by way of a website, you've cut out some really fun opportunities.

This is totally a first-world problem, and I do not think you're a villain here or anything. I want to propose using for your monopoly for the greater good—sell most of your domains at reasonable prices to the fellow Matts of the world.

Perhaps you could just sell the domains at the total cost of renewing the respective TLD for so many years. Or sell them just for any ownership transfer fees, giving a bit of a leg-up to the not-so-rich Matts out there. Verify them by asking for some kind of established presence on the internet. There's a lot to consider here, of course.

Maybe there is an exciting fundraising opportunity for a worthwhile charity of your choice (you'd know more about that than I ever could!), by auctioning the domains to the highest bidders. I'm sure us not-rich Matts could be happy with that.

It's a big ask, I realise. Clearly your time is valuable. Possibly you could delegate a person or committee to liberate these domains reasonably? The clear thing here is that your large matt.* portfolio serves you little purpose, and it could be an excellent opportunity to do some good for either the wider Matt community or a worthwhile cause.

Sincerely,
Matt.

Photograph by Christopher Michel licensed under CC BY 2.0