Here are three true stories. The other day I wanted to find some trivial detail about Hillary Clinton – date of birth – and thought the White House website would be just the place to find it. So I typed “whitehouse” into my state-of-the-art Netscape 4.7 browser, just as you are now supposed to be able to do – and was, indeed, magically led to www.whitehouse.com.
But I found no details about Hillary – nor, indeed, about Bill. Instead, I was offered “XXX Choice Models” and a “Teen Buffet”: the new technology of our age had taken me direct to a porn site. I then realised that Netscape was programmed to take me to a commercial .com site – the US equivalent of a .co.uk site – so I presumed that what I really wanted was www.whitehouse.org.
But no: I was then redirected to www.bondage.com. Finally, I found my way to www.whitehouse.gov. There, as reassuring and American as apple pie, an official picture of the White House, flanked by the Stars and Stripes, at last filled my screen.
Second story: I know a man in the US who planned to start a cyber-business selling vitamins. He wanted to call it “vitamins.com” – but found that domain name had already been bought up. He says it cost him several million dollars to buy what he considers a valuable website address: www.vitamins.com – and now that his business is up and running, he believes his investment well worthwhile.
Third: wanting to find out whether George W Bush had any thoughts about the issues of the day – or, indeed, any thoughts at all – I went to the obvious website of www.gwbush.com. “Thanks to Bush,” the site immediately proclaimed, “Texans are now jailed up to a year for even ‘trace’ amounts of cocaine . . . While in jail they are unlikely to get drug treatment because Bush has slashed the programs.” This was accompanied by pictures of Bush purporting to show him behind prison bars and another of him apparently snorting cocaine. “This site was created by Zack Exley,” I was informed.
Washington is the most cyber-connected city in the world, and this electoral year historic new phenomena are emerging: the overwhelming importance of political websites as campaigning tools – and of the domain-profiteers determined to sabotage them. The latter are people who forecast that the names of certain websites will become valuable, so go off to an organisation called Network Solutions/InterNIC and register a domain for just $70. They then sit on their speculation, waiting for it to mount in value.
Election 2000 is the first where both legitimate and spoof competing websites, coupled with domain-profiteering, are crucial factors. Bush, for example, went to court to try to ban Zack Exley’s website from the world’s computers – but only drew further attention to it, with a million “hits” in the weeks after he went to court last summer. Exley says he will part with the domain – but it will cost Bush $300,000.
And what about Al Gore, the man who claims to have created the Internet itself? The current bane of his life is Ted Weinstein, another speculator. “I’ve registered a range of domain names that the Gore campaign should have reserved for itself already,” he says. “Actually, I’m not hoping to make a vast profit, just make a couple of points and get the Gore folks to do the right thing.”
Typical of the domains he has registered is www.goredaley.org – an address that will become gold-dust if Gore gets the Democratic nomination then chooses Mayor Daley of Chicago to be his running mate (which could easily happen).
Meanwhile Steve Forbes, the wealthy no-hoper but indefatigable Republican contender, has bought several web- site addresses from a domain speculator named Alex Goldstein. Early in 1999, Goldstein registered nine would-be Bush website addresses and five linked to Forbes: “I’ve registered them primarily for speculative purposes,” he said. “I believe their value will increase substantially over time, as the Internet becomes a more important medium for shaping public opinion. The fact that politicians with millions of campaign dollars do not reserve names for $70 is unconscionable.”
Indeed. Of the 28 incumbent senators planning to stand for re-election next year, potential website addresses for 16 of them are owned by yet another domain merchant, Peter Lucas.
These multi-million dollar squabbles over the spoof websites make the genuine ones seem anti-climactic. But the genuine websites – www.georgewbush.com, www.algore2000.com, www.billbradley. com and www.mccain2000.com – are all highly slick as well as brand new methods of political communication.
A quick click of the mouse on Bush’s site and Hispanic voters can read about election 2000 in Spanish (“Prosperidad con un proposito“); all four allow browsers to click on “Contribute” or “Get involved” and then be channelled to local campaign HQs. Webmasters know what wins votes: all four sites feature the US flag.
For responsible all-round coverage, it’s hard to beat the New York Times‘s site (www.nytimes.com/library/politics/camp/whouse – registration required). For sheer political fun, though, give me mischievous domains such as www.algore-2000.org (“Working against the American people, we have sparked moral decay across the country”) or www.buchanan2000.com (“Are you sure you fit into Pat Buchanan’s Vision of America?”) any time. Politics, irrefutably and irrevocably, has now finally entered the cyber era for real.
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