A decades-long fight over a simple web address — Twins.com — between twin brothers Durland and Darvin Miller and Major League Baseball finally settled earlier this month when ownership of the URL transferred to MLB.
The Miller twins registered the address in 1995, three years before the league first claimed the rights to majorleaguebaseball.com and five years before the league registered MLB.com. Over the years, MLB sought out and purchased various URLs from private owners, including most recently Rangers.com, which was bought in 2015 for $375,000.
But three holdover URLs remained outside of MLB’s ownership. Giants.com is owned by the NFL and the New York Giants and Rays.com is owned and operated by a Seattle seafood restaurant called Ray’s Boathouse.
The third, Twins.com, was owned by the Miller twins who essentially squatted on the site for more than 25 years. However, as of earlier this month, ownership of the URL was held by MLB Advanced Media, according to a back-end search of domain name ownership.
The long ordeal surrounding Twins.com and the brothers’ feud with baseball’s billion-dollar corporation was the subject of an in-depth article in 2015 from Ben Lindbergh at Grantland. Lindbergh on Monday first reported the news of the domain’s quiet sale.
According to Lindbergh, the twin brothers sold the URL to MLB for an undisclosed price through a third-party broker.
.