The Human Website: When Someone Became a Living, Breathing URL
When Identity Met the Internet Age
On November 12, 1997, Denver County Court Judge Patricia Williams approved what may be the most digitally prescient name change in legal history. Standing before her was a 34-year-old software programmer formerly known as Michael Robert Johnson, who had successfully petitioned to legally change his full name to "www.ChristmasGifts.com" — periods, double-u's, and all.
Photo: Judge Patricia Williams, via imgv2-2-f.scribdassets.com
Photo: Denver County Court, via cdn10.localdatacdn.com
Johnson — now legally www.ChristmasGifts.com — had purchased the domain earlier that year and wanted his personal identity to match his business venture. What seemed like a clever marketing stunt would spiral into a decade-long administrative nightmare that exposed how unprepared American bureaucracy was for the internet age.
The Judge Who Said Yes
Judge Williams later admitted she approved the name change primarily because she didn't understand what a "dot-com" was. "He seemed like a nice young man with an unusual but harmless request," she recalled in a 2005 interview. "I thought it was some kind of artistic expression, like those people who change their names to symbols."
The legal standard for name changes in Colorado was relatively simple: the new name couldn't be fraudulent, obscene, or designed to avoid debt. A website address, however bizarre, didn't obviously violate any of these criteria.
www.ChristmasGifts.com walked out of court with official documentation that would soon confound government agencies across the country.
The Social Security Meltdown
The first sign of trouble came three weeks later, when www.ChristmasGifts.com tried to update his Social Security records. The SSA's computer system, designed in the 1970s, couldn't process a name containing periods. The system interpreted each period as a data field separator, splitting his name into fragments: "www," "ChristmasGifts," and "com."
The result was bureaucratic chaos. Social Security computers thought they were dealing with three different people. The first was named "www" with no last name. The second was "ChristmasGifts" with no first name. The third was simply "com."
SSA workers spent six months trying to merge these phantom identities back into a single person, creating a paper trail that suggested www.ChristmasGifts.com had multiple personality disorder at the federal level.
The DMV's Digital Breakdown
Colorado's Department of Motor Vehicles faced a different but equally absurd problem. Their system could handle the periods, but not the length. "www.ChristmasGifts.com" contained 22 characters, but driver's license databases were programmed to accept a maximum of 20 characters for full names.
The DMV's solution was to truncate his name to "www.ChristmasGifts," creating a driver's license for someone who technically didn't exist. When pulled over for speeding in March 1998, www.ChristmasGifts.com had to carry both his legal name change documentation and his driver's license to prove they referred to the same person.
The traffic cop, thoroughly confused, issued the ticket to "John Doe" and noted in his report that the driver "claims to be a website."
The IRS Gets Creative
The Internal Revenue Service developed the most creative workaround. Unable to process punctuation in taxpayer names, they simply replaced all periods with spaces, creating tax records for "www ChristmasGifts com."
This created a new problem: the IRS computer system interpreted "www" as a first name, "ChristmasGifts" as a middle name, and "com" as a last name. For tax purposes, www.ChristmasGifts.com became "www com," with "ChristmasGifts" relegated to middle initial status.
His 1998 tax return was addressed to "Mr. www com," which the postal service somehow successfully delivered.
The Passport Office Says No
The State Department's passport office drew the line at international travel. After eight months of internal deliberation, they ruled that www.ChristmasGifts.com could not receive a passport because foreign immigration systems couldn't process his name format.
"We cannot issue travel documents to someone whose name might crash computer systems in other countries," explained State Department spokesperson Linda Morrison. "It's a matter of national diplomatic courtesy."
www.ChristmasGifts.com was effectively trapped in the United States by his own digital identity.
The Banking Nightmare
Opening bank accounts became an exercise in creative problem-solving. Most banks' computer systems rejected his name as invalid data entry. Those that accepted it often couldn't print checks correctly, leading to payment processing errors and confused merchants.
First National Bank of Denver finally agreed to open an account under the name "W.W.W. ChristmasGifts Com," using periods as middle initials. His checks looked like they were written by someone with the most unusual triple-initial name in financial history.
The Copycat Effect
www.ChristmasGifts.com's legal victory inspired others to attempt similar name changes. Between 1998 and 2001, courts across the country received petitions from people wanting to change their names to email addresses, domain names, and even social media handles (though social media didn't exist yet).
Most were rejected after judges learned from Colorado's experience, but a few slipped through:
- Oregon approved "[email protected]" in 1999
- A Texas judge allowed "http://www.LoneStar.org" in 2000
- Florida briefly had a resident named "[email protected]" before the state attorney general intervened
The Great Name Change Reversal
By 2005, www.ChristmasGifts.com had grown exhausted by the constant bureaucratic battles. His Christmas gift website had failed, his domain had expired, and he was tired of explaining his name to every government agency, bank teller, and customer service representative he encountered.
He petitioned Denver County Court to change his name back to Michael Robert Johnson. Judge Williams, still on the bench, approved the request immediately. "I learned my lesson about approving things I don't understand," she said.
The Legacy of Living URLs
Michael Johnson's eight-year experiment as a human website revealed the profound disconnect between America's analog legal infrastructure and the digital revolution. Government databases designed for "John Smith" and "Mary Jones" simply couldn't handle the creative possibilities of internet-age identity.
His case prompted updates to dozens of government computer systems and influenced legal guidelines for name changes in the digital era. Most courts now specifically prohibit names containing internet-related punctuation or formatting.
The Lessons of Digital Identity
www.ChristmasGifts.com's story captures a unique moment in American history — the collision between pre-digital bureaucracy and post-digital ambition. His legal name change succeeded because one judge didn't understand what a website was, but failed practically because entire government systems couldn't process what he had become.
In trying to merge his personal and digital identities, Michael Johnson accidentally exposed how unprepared America was for citizens who thought of themselves as part of the internet itself. He was a human beta test for the connected age, debugging government systems one frustrated bureaucrat at a time.
Today, with social media handles and digital personas central to identity, his experiment seems almost prophetic — a glimpse of a future where the line between human and online identity would become increasingly blurred.
Michael Johnson may have given up being www.ChristmasGifts.com, but for eight years, he was living proof that in America, you really could become anything — even if the government's computers couldn't figure out how to handle it.