Actually, I'm surprised it took as long as it did. AOL may have come by the wow.com name honestly, but using it for something that wasn't about Blizzard's biggest property is very different from turning it into a Warcraft news site.

I just wonder if they handled it with a carrot (a big cash payout for the domain) or the stick (threat of a cybersquatting suit.)

Nice theory, but you forgot the CIA's place in this whole thing. Adam Holisky was on the grassy gnoll, man! 9/15 was an inside job!

They couldn't technically be cybersquatting since they did purchase the domain before the game came out. I remember it was a content portal. Don't remember exactly for what, I went to it once or twice. Back then, every company was opening a "content portal", and hoping for your traffic. It was probably just a search engine with a bunch of news stories.

They just never got rid of the domain.

I bet Blizzard came along eventually and offered to buy the domain. The guys who owned Starcraft2.com and Diablo3.com eventually got asked by Blizzard for the domains. Both of them gave them the domain without trouble. I am sure they were paid for them. At the time Blizzard said "Oh, it doesn't mean we are doing StarCraft 2 or Diablo 3, we simply want the domain names for copyright purposes.', but we see that wasn't true.

http://web.archive.org/web/20060527013954/http://wow.com/
is the earliest(AOL) copy of the site if you want to see what it was like

previously it was owned by CompuServe, or atleast acording to the internet archive.

CompuServe Information Service was bought out by aol,
/facepalm at myself for not realizing that.

I just wonder how long it'll take them to update all their guide buttons that say "wow.com's Guide to ________"