True story.
A good friend of mine was planning a baby shower and sent out a very nice Evite for the occasion. In the invitation, she included a note that the mom-to-be was registered at Giggles.com and encouraged the guests to visit the site and choose gifts from her registry.
That all sounds great, right?
But there was a slight problem. Giggles.com is a site that sells items meant to "enhance your love life."
Where she should have directed people in the invite was to Giggle .com, whose tagline is, "healthy. happy. baby."
Once the embarrassing, and quite funny, error was spotted, an updated invitation was quickly dispatched, the baby shower went off without a hitch and appropriate gifts were purchased by all.
While all was well in that case of the mistaken baby shower present URL, ethical issues have swirled around the use of and creation of internet addresses since the start of the web's global popularity.
Some of these kinds of issues are well known. The most common is called "cybersquatting," which essentially refers to people who go out and buy domain names not to use them, but to sell them back to companies who need them.
This issue was actually addressed by the federal government in 1999 by the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act. According to an article on Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society's web site, the Act gave the owners of trademarks "a cause of action against anyone who, with a bad faith intent to profit from the goodwill of another's trademark, registers, traffics in, or uses a domain name that is identical to, or confusingly similar to a distinctive mark, or dilutive of a famous mark, without regard to the goods or services of the parties."
That certainly helped tamp down the practice, but it didn't eliminate it. Even with that legislation enacted, the United States government could not wrest control of WhiteHouse.com or WhiteHouse.org, and iconic rocker Bruce Springsteen could not get back the rights to his namesake web address.
And then there is the even murkier tactic of "typosquatting" -- buying slightly misspelled URLs of highly trafficked sites and using the siphoned traffic for less than ethical purposes. Sophos, an online data security company, recently investigated the practice, and what they found was quite disturbing. According to a Dec. 2011 article about the Sophos findings on the SecurityAsia website, "The study revealed that there is a significant typosquatting ecosystem around high-profile, often-typed domain names. A huge 86% of the possible one letter misspellings of the Apple homepage led to typosquatting sites."
But is typosquatting illegal? Yes, and it is covered in the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act. However, according to a Nov. 2011 article in Business Week, "Companies can defend against attacks by registering any available typo domains themselves or by taking legal action, but tracking down the owners of typo domains is difficult and time-consuming."
However, when it comes to questionable domain name hijinks, the sketchiest and slickest is 100% legal -- the .org suffix. Most people get a warm and fuzzy feeling when they visit a .org web site, knowing they are supporting a non-profit organization whose efforts are designed to help the common good. If only that were actually true.
In reality, the .org designation means next to nothing, and anyone can append it to any kind of site. What's the most well known example? Craigslist.org. Not only is that site not the altruistic non-profit many people think it is, but according to an analysis done by NakedApartments.com, Craigslist could have made almost $15 million from brokers' apartment listings in 2011 in New York City alone.
For more than nine years, the .org designation has been managed by the Public Interest Registry, which, actually, is a non-profit. But when you go to their site to get some insight and context on the hows and whys of using a .org, what you find is pretty amorphous.
PIR has built an entire site designed to market the use of .orgs. The site is http://whyichose.org/, and its tagline is, "WHEN WHAT YOU DO MATTERS." (So other kinds of sites are for people who do things that don't matter?) In the "About" section of that site, PIR explains the following: "As one of the original domains, .ORG has been shaped by the global community as the place to express ideas, knowledge, and causes on the Internet. Whether an individual with an idea to share, a small club organizing and motivating your members, or a large company conducting educational and marketing campaigns - the .ORG domain name communicates trust, credibility, and community interest."
That certainly sounds good, but if any person with any kind of site can run a .org, what does it really mean and what can consumers assume when they visit a .org site? In short, nothing.
It all boils down to a kind of marketing wish fulfillment -- if you build a .org, good people will come. But if internet users knew that such sites don't necessarily represent the kinds of values and efforts they thought they did, would they feel the same way, and would so many visit?
What's the solution? Create a category truly just for non-profits, not unlike the government's .gov or the military's .mil. That kind of designation would go a long way in clarifying for consumers exactly what they can expect when they type in a URL. And dealing with the issue now is more crucial than ever, given the fact that Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the group that has control over top-level domains, is about to exponentially expand their number to include things like .beer and .pizza. Those kinds of new web addresses will help a lot of businesses stand out online, and nonprofits deserve the same kind of specificity.
John D. Thomas is a Chicago-based writer of the novel "Karaoke of Blood." He is currently finishing a book on the cultural history of saliva.
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