Accusations have abounded for years that Coca-Cola is a monopoly. And it is, it was released to celebrate the company's 125th anniversary, including tokens like a polar bear, a delivery truck, a can and that's not the sort of monopoly we're talking about, smart arse. Coke pretty much have the carbonated soda industry tied up thanks to their long history and secret formula, although because the likes of Pepsi exist, they can't be considered a true monopoly (characterized by a single seller of a well-defined commodity for which there are no good substitutes and by high barriers to the entry of other firms into the market for that commodity). Weirdly, though, they do have a monopoly on websites with "ahh" in the name. In fact Coca-Cola own the websites www.ahh.com all the way to ahhhh with about fifty "h"s in it, a fact that is rarely advertised by anyone, let alone Coke themselves. Which is pretty weird to begin with - companies will often buy up URLs of misspellings and slogans related to their products, as redirects to their main websites - but then you start digging into what's actually on all of these hoarded websites that aren't linked to on any other Coke page, and things get weirder. www.ahh.com acts as the landing page for all these subsidary websites, which includes one where you guess the difference between a cat and not a cat, there's a 2014 World Cup Shootout game, and less interactive pages like a happy place, or this weird Möbius strip thing. All the sorts of bonkers, throwaway Flash stuff we expect from bored or mischievous webmasters with a lot of downtime, but do Cola really wanna waste their time with this sort of thing? Especially when the public at large is totally ignorant to its existence? Weird.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
