Network Solutions

In 1993 Network Solutions won a contract from the US National Science Foundation to run domain registration as part of InterNIC, a job previously handled by SRI-NIC. Registrations were free, and nobody expected many of them. Two years later the web exploded, and in 1995 the company started charging $100 for two years.

Its monopoly on .com, .net and .org made it a gold mine and the internet's most loathed customer service desk. Competition among registrars only opened up in 1999. In 2000 Verisign bought the company for roughly $21 billion in stock, kept the registry itself and in 2003 sold off the retail business for a fraction of the price — the whole dot-com valuation curve in one company.