Searching the 'Net for the Starr Report? As you might expect, you can still find the results of the Independent Counsel's investigation into the Clinton Presidency, along with Clinton's rebuttals, at the special page set aside for it on whitehouse.com.
When you first arrive at that site, however, you're likely to find something else you might not expect. The home page at whitehouse.com features a doctored photograph depicting President Clinton with his trousers unzipped and his arm around a lingerie model, upon whose shoulders has been pasted the face of Monica Lewinsky.
Surprised? Then perhaps I should explain that whitehouse.com has nothing whatsoever to do with the White House, or the United States Government at all. It's a porn site — one of two (along with thewhitehouse.com) created by a Dan Parisi of Secaucus, NJ, to capitalize on a commonplace error.
The real White House Web site can be found at whitehouse.gov. Like most genuine government sites, it belongs to the reserved ".gov" domain — and not ".com," which is used by commercial and business sites. The distinction is likely to escape many casual Web surfers, though, if they aren't familiar with the way Internet domain names have been structured.
Despite the confusion these misleading Web sites could potentially cause voters, so far the Government has been unable to take them offline. In a letter to Dan Parisi dated December 7, 1997, Counsel to the President Charles F. C. Ruff wrote: "However distasteful your business may be, we do not challenge your right to pursue it or to exercise your First Amendment rights, but we do challenge your right to use the White House, the President, and the First Lady as a marketing device." Still, almost a year later, whitehouse.com remains - and the Monica Lewinsky scandal has hardly left it starved for satiric material.
Other efforts to bring down the fake White House sites have also failed, including an attempt by California resident Jim Salmon to use Parisi's own deceptive naming practice against him. Salmon registered some 400 "high profile" domains himself, at an estimated cost of $40,000, and pointed them all at the whitehouse.com site. He used celebrity names, as well as innocuous phrases like "billofrights.com" and "firstamendment.com," in hopes of drawing as many people as possible to the page.
Through somewhat dubious reasoning, Salmon saw his efforts as raising public awareness of what he considered an offensive site. He felt this publicity would eventually create a backlash that would spell the end of Parisi's business. But when the actual celebrities whose names he had registered caught wind of what he was doing, Salmon came under legal pressure to take down his links.
While Parisi's idea of co-opting the White House name to promote pornography may be particularly offensive to patriotic net surfers, he is far from being alone in his tactics. And not all of the sites utilizing misleading domain names are doing it based on civic-minded motives, as Jim Salmon claimed to be.
One purely commercial venture can be found at uscongress.com, albeit a slightly less sensational one than Dan Parisi's porn sites. Run by Austin, TX-based Advanced Legal Technologies, LLC, the site offers links to Congressional Members' email addresses and home pages.
Advanced Legal Technologies bills itself as "a full-service technology company assisting both law firms and political entities with web site design and maintenance." A link to their own home page provides a list of their current clients. While the list does include some government agencies — mostly within the state of Texas — the United States Congress is not one of them.
Many would say there's nothing wrong with this practice, or even with distributing porn over the Internet. But while setting up pornographic Web pages at otherwise harmless-seeming addresses is often viewed with good humor by some Netizens, most agree that it's a bad thing when such links lead children to view sexually explicit material on the Web. It's easy for misleading address names to evade software parents might use to screen their kids' Web links for inappropriate material.
Worse, the case of "Ed Marlow" underscores an even more sinister possibility of the misuse of Internet domain names. Last week Marlow, a California resident, set up several domain names that seemingly belonged to major newspapers in various markets. For example, while the home page of the Philadelphia Inquirer may be found at phillynews.com/inq/front_page, Marlow registered the domain philadelphiainquirer.com. Other papers affected included the San Jose Mercury News, Chicago Sun-Times, Atlanta Constitution, Cleveland Plain Dealer, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Albuquerque Tribune, London Telegraph, and the San Francisco Examiner.
In the same way that Jim Salmon pointed his 400 domains to whitehouse.com, for several days Marlow operated these sound-alike Web addresses as links to another site — though in Marlow's case it was purely for publicity purposes, rather than to draw negative attention. The site Marlow wanted to promote is called "Stormfront," and is operated by a Mr. Don Black of Palm Beach, FL. An ex-con and former Ku Klux Klan leader, Black uses the "Stormfront" site to promote his racialist philosophy, which he sums up with the phrase, "White Pride World Wide"(sic). Thanks to Marlow, readers who mistakenly typed the wrong address for their local paper would end up seeing a very different editorial slant than they expected.
There have been similar cases in the recent past, where deceptive domain names have been used to promote a political agenda. Richard Bucci of Syracuse, NY, registered the domain plannedparenthood.com and used it as a platform to distribute a book arguing against abortion. In this case, however, the Federal District Court decided in favor of the real Planned Parenthood organization, stating that Bucci had violated the reproductive health care group's trademark in registering the plannedparenthood.com domain. Similarly, all the newspapers targeted by Ed Marlow are planning legal action, based on violation of trademarks.
Unfortunately for President Clinton, however, "White House" is not a trademarked name, and so Dan Parisi's porn sites can't be attacked on those grounds.
Part of the problem is in the way Internet domains have traditionally been registered. Network Solutions Inc., whose Web site is at internic.net, has long been the sole registrar of Internet names, and their policy is to issue them on a first-come, first-served basis to anyone willing to pay a registration fee of $70.
Network Solutions does not discriminate when assigning domain names based upon who is making the request. They are so universal in this policy, in fact, that they have even registered a site at internic.com, to a company calling itself Internic Software. A large banner on the site advertises "Domain Names", but a fine-print disclaimer explains that Internic Software is only a "domain name broker" — not a registrar — and is not affiliated in any way with Network Solutions.
Forcing regulation of Network Solutions's registration policy isn't the answer, either. To complicate matters, Network Solutions has recently completed negotiations with the U.S. government to give up their monopoly on domain name registration, making the transition to a shared system complete by June, 1999. It remains to be seen what policies will be implemented by the new registrar organizations that will enter the market at that time.
What we're left with is one of the thornier problems facing the 'Net community today: How to preserve brand recognition and business identity in a world where the Internet has leveled the marketing playing field between mega-corporations and individuals alike. We may find that the more computer networks bring us together, the greater the need to find new and specialized ways of setting ourselves apart.
