Paying to be first is not new

Before search was good, directories were the map of the web — and several of them sorted their listings by whoever paid the most to be near the top.

A search engine that ranked results by advertiser bid, printed the price next to each one, and became the business model that funded the modern web.

A million pixels at a dollar each, sold on one page by a student who needed tuition money. Every pixel board since is a footnote to it.

Pay more than the last monarch, take the throne, and raise the price for whoever comes next. The first pay-to-rank game where the rules were code.

Four hundred and forty-nine boards in a fortnight, one of them taking two-thirds of everything reported. What actually happened, dated from the registry.