The name "Liberty" was first used by our company in 1992 when we named one of our Bulletin Board System (BBS) "The Liberty BBS". This was not the first BBS that we had operated. For a few years prior to that we operated another BBS called the "MEDCOM BBS".

Unfortunately, during the time that we operated the "MEDCOM BBS", most computers were sold without modems! Most people did not have computers. Few people that owned computers had modems connected to them and very few people had any knowledge of the existence of dial-up Bulletin Board Systems. For the most part, the Internet still existed mostly in the realm of universities, research labs, and the military. There was almost zero mention of the Internet in the media and the web and web browsers as we know them today did not even exist!

In 1992, I decided to use the BBS software that was already owned by Medcom to set up a small 8 line BBS that I would use to try to educate the public about libertarianism and objectivisim, my own political and philosophical points of view. I called this new BBS "The Liberty BBS".

Even though we shut down the Medcom BBS for a couple of years, we kept 8 on the phone lines. Those phone lines would just ring without any answer for the years between the termination of the Medcom BBS and the start of the Liberty BBS. Suprisingly, some people started calling into the Liberty BBS right away after I re-connected those 8 lines to the Liberty BBS! There were some people that had been periodically testing those phone numbers every few weeks on the faint hope they would someday find another BBS reconnected to the lines. Their persistence was rewarded when I started the Liberty BBS and those phone lines started to answer again!

Originally, my only intention was to keep the Liberty BBS as a small hobby system that I would work on after business hours. The purpose was to provide information about libertarian and objectivist principles and to provide an online platform for sharing information through chat and forums. I had originally planned to keep this as a free BBS open to the public.

What I did not realize was that between 1989 and 1992, the number of computers with modems and the number of people that understood how to connect to online systems, such as AOL, had grown enormously and was continuing to grow rapidly! The Liberty BBS outgrew its 8 lines very quickly and we needed to add many more lines to accommodate everyone that wanted to participate in our BBS. In order to cover these expansion costs, we added a subscription fee to the Liberty BBS. Within just a few months we grew to over 170 phone lines throughout most of California plus some local access in the Chicago area! Hundreds of people became subscribers to the Liberty BBS in just a few months.

In order to provide a great diversity of features to our subscribers, we added additional BBS systems to our network and named the network of systems and services the "Liberty Information Network". Both the "Liberty BBS" and the "Liberty Information Network" were registered as DBAs of Medcom Information Services, Inc. but were commonly known to our subscribers, prospects and vendors as simply "Liberty". With the huge number of dial-up phone lines and rapid growth in subscribers, Liberty was recognized by many major computer publications as being one of the biggest and most popular Bulletin Board Systems in the United States! Liberty was often ranked in the Top 10 list provided by a number of computer magazines of the best BBS systems.

Concentric BBS Direct was a national network project whose goal was to provide local access across much of the nation to just a handful of the top BBS systems in the nation. The Liberty BBS was selected as one of those systems because of its national popularity and wealth of features. We also joined the Public Packet Networks (PPN) of SprintNet and Pacific Bell to expand low-cost access to our network nationwide.

In 1993, we started to explore the idea of connecting the Liberty BBS to the internet. We applied for the domain name "liberty.com" and that domain name was granted to us in 1993. At that time it was not a simple matter of just registering a domain name. There was no cost to registering a domain name, but an applicant did have to demonstrate a need for a domain name and had to be very patient as it would often take several weeks for a domain name to be granted.

Once we had out domain name of "liberty.com", we connected our BBS network to the internet. We were then able to offer our subscribers Usenet Newsgroups via the news.liberty.com news server, internet e-mail via their userid@liberty.com via Liberty mail server at mail.liberty.com. In order to keep the newsgroup bandwidth load off of our Internet connection, we installed two satellite dishes on the roof of our building to receive the newsfeeds via satellite. To this day, the "liberty.com" domain name is still used for a mail server to provide e-mail services and is used to provide thousands of page hit counters to many of our current clients.

The most important benefit of the Internet to Liberty was that it allowed people throughout the United States and the world to "telnet" into "liberty.com" so that they could access our BBS systems and features without any long distance charges! This greatly expanded Liberty's subscriber base not only nationally, but also worldwide!

However, the Internet proved to be a mixed blessing for Liberty and for all BBS systems for that matter. Although the internet made it easy for anyone anywhere in the world to access the BBS without astronomical long-distance telephone charges, the internet also brought with it a new feature that would ultimately provide to be the demise of BBS systems: Mosaic.

Many of you who are reading this probably have never heard of Mosaic. Mosaic was the direct predecessor of Netscape and the indirect predecessor of Internet Explorer. Mosaic was the first graphical web browser. People started to turn their attention to "Web Surfing", exploring web sites around the world and some even started to build their own web sites. For a while, the subscription base of our BBS was bolstered by the ability of people to telnet to our BBS. But, over time, more and more people started spending more time surfing the web for free and subscription renewals to the Liberty BBS started to drop rapidly.

The Internet had a similar impact on most BBS systems as there are very few still in operation today, especially compared to their heyday of the early 1990s. Even "Boardwatch Magazine", the professional magazine of the "Bulletin Board" industry, shifted gears and oriented themselves to Internet Service Providers (ISP). Though "Boardwatch Magazine" is still in business, you won't find much about "boards" in "Boardwatch" anymore! The annual convention of BBS operators, "BBScon", became "ISPcon". The death of the entire Bulletin Board industry was soon to follow.

Many of our competitors in the BBS world became ISPs themselves. Many got into web desgin and web hosting. We entered this arena ourselves for a while and actually became one of the largest ISPs in California! However, it soon became obvious that it was going to take a continuous influx of new money to continue to upgrade equipment every few months to keep up with the latest technology and compete with the big players getting into this business. Rather than trying to compete with everyone in the general ISP market, we made a strategic decision to pick out one business sector and become experts at providing internet services and hosting to that sector.

Trains were an area of interest to a number of principles in our company, so that is the business sector that we selected! We started TrainWeb.com in 1995 and it did become the most known and most visited website for rail related information within the next few years. Click here to visit that site now! But, that is another story.

As mentioned above, even though the domain name "liberty.com" has been in continuous commercial use since 1993 for telnet access, e-mail services and page hit counters, a great deal of effort has never been placed into design of a website for the "www.liberty.com" URL. In the year 1999, we did post a page that did little more than indicate that the "liberty.com" domain name was available for sale.

The "Liberty.com For Sale" web page came to the attention of another "Liberty" that we had never heard of: "Liberty PLC". "Liberty PLC" is headquartered in the United Kingdom. From examining our web page at "www.liberty.com", all that Liberty PLC learned about us was that we had placed the domain name up for sale. Liberty PLC had no knowledge of our use of "liberty.com" to provide telnet, ftp, e-mail and news services to our clients. The web page gave no indication that we had been providing such commercial services at "liberty.com" since 1993 and that we are still providing most of those services to our current clients today!

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has established rules to help resolved domain name disputes. Everyone that registers a .com, .net or .org domain name agrees to abide by the ICANN rules and procedures when they register a domain name. Click here to read more about the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy. Liberty PLC filed a Complaint and we filed a Response in relation to the domain name "liberty.com". Click here if you would like to read the actual text of the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy and click here if you would like to read the text of the Rules for Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy.

To provide a real brief summary of the policy, the Complainant has to prove all 3 of the following: (1) that the domain name "liberty.com" is confusingly similar to their own name, (2) that we have no legitimate interest in the domain name, and (3) that we registered the domain name in "bad faith". Skipping over (1) for the moment, we can document very clearly that both (2) and (3) are false. We were operating the "Liberty BBS" and "Liberty Information Network" several months before we ever considered establishing a connection between Liberty and the Interent. Thus, we had a legitimate interest in the "liberty.com" domain name. Since we were commonly known to our subscribers, prospects and vendors as "Liberty", it was logical that we would select "liberty.com" for our domain name. Thus, we certainly did not register the domain name "liberty.com" in bad faith. On the first and final point, I suppose it certainly could be argued that "liberty.com" is confusingly similar to "Liberty PLC". However, there are many companies and organizations that incorporate the common word "liberty" as the main identifier of their name. There are even dozens of domain names that incorporate the word "liberty". It could be argued that all of these companies and domains are confusingly similar to each other.

ICANN has wisely established that all 3 points must be proven before they will direct that a domain name be transferred from the party that currently holds the domain name to the party that filed the Complaint. We registered "liberty.com" in 1993 as the most logical domain name for our service that was already in operation. We had a legitimate interest in the domain name and did not register it in bad faith. We do find it a bit ironic that for the second time in history the English were attempting to deprive Americans of liberty! Fortunately, the outcome was just as favorable this time and the British, once again, failed to deprive us of our liberty! ICANN ruled that we did not have to transfer "liberty.com" to "Liberty PLC".

Now that the ruling has allowed us to hold onto the "liberty.com" domain name, we are going to go back to our roots that inspired the creation of the "Liberty BBS" and the "Liberty Information Network". For as long as we continue to own "liberty.com", we will make sure that a major feature of the site will be to provide links to liberty related information. "www.liberty.com" will be able to provide information on liberty, freedom, libertarianism, and objectivism just as well as, if not better than, the original "Liberty BBS" that was established in 1992.

On March 15, 2002, a new format for "Liberty.com" was launched. It now serves as a convenient portal to news and reference information. We expect this will attract new visitors to continue to re-visit the "Liberty.com" website many times. It will be a resource for everyone, and not just those that have a special interest in issues of liberty and freedom. But, the liberty resources will continue to be featured prominently at the top of the page with the hope that more and more people will be exposed to these important issues.

This page is currently under construction. Please check back from time to time and follow the "Rebirth Of Liberty"!