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Completely unrelated to the story, but why in the world does ABC News use 'abcnews.go.com' instead of just 'abcnews.com' (which redirects)? And could 'go.com' look any more like a domain squatting page?

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It sets a global cookie for .go.com:

Set-Cookie: SWID=6AF8F108-71B2-4874-ACB7-29718B8D7C91; path=/; expires=Wed, 05-Jan-2031 19:33:42 GMT; domain=.go.com;

ESPN does this too and I have no idea why. Maybe it's legacy from the portal years?

Disney owns ABC and ESPN. I vaguely remember plugs on TV in the mid-90s that mentioned go.com when referring to ABC or ESPN. I think this was the time period when most people were used to hearing AOL keywords instead of actual URLs and domain names when websites were advertised.

So yeah, it's probably legacy.

ABC paid a lot of money for Go.com back in the bubble years, but yeah, it is pretty weird that that property has persisted for so long. They must have some reason to believe that it is beneficial.

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