That was also the era of the “AOL keyword”, where print and TV ads would literally say something like “in AOL, type the keyword ‘petstore’ to visit us”. They were a namespace where catchy and/or obvious labels sold to the highest bidder. It seemed inevitable that the same marketing teams who’d pay AOL lots of money for “petstore” would think it’s a great idea to buy the same keyword in the (in their thinking) Internet equivalent dotcom namespace.