'Cybersquatters' play
virtual politics
with same-sex
marriage
By ROB SHAW,
globetrechnology.com from the Web, June 20, 2005
What's in a name? For politicians,
everything.
It contains a reputation and a lifetime of political capital, all rolled into an
easy two-word brand. But on the wild, mostly lawless Internet, a name is
only as good as the first person to register it.
Canadian politicians debating same-sex marriage have suddenly found themselves
into the worldwide debate over "cybersquatting" -- appropriating someone else's
name and claiming it as your website address. It's usually done for
profit, but it's increasingly used as a political tool as well.
At least 50 MPs -- mostly supporters of same-sex marriage -- have discovered
that their names have been registered as websites by the Defend Marriage
Coalition, a lobby group against same-sex unions. Names such as Joseph
Volpe, Chuck Cadman and David McGuinty are already staked out.
When Liberal MP Don Boudria logs on to
www.donboudria.ca, he
sees his official photo and constituency information, but also the headline:
"Can you trust Don Boudria?" The site calls his constituents to "send Don
Boudria an e-mail and let him know that you want him to vote against Bill C-38
and to protect the definition of marriage."
This month, Mr. Boudria raised the problem in the House. "If you're a
Member of Parliament, everybody assumes that the name-of-the-MP.ca will give you
your MP," he said in an interview.
The discussion raised the gall of Conservative MP Jason Kenney.
"It makes me a little nervous when I hear about politicians that want to
regulate the Internet," he said. "I don't think the state should be
intervening in that."
Mr. Kenney said he is not bothered that an unknown party registered
www.jasonkenney.org and
linked it to Egale Canada, a group that promotes gay rights. (Egale denies
any involvement.)
Almost anyone with a credit card can register any domain name on the Internet.
It costs $50 to register a website with a .ca extension for a one-year lease.
In most cases of cybersquatting, someone claims a site name resembling an
existing corporation, celebrity or catchphrase to resell for profit, often a
hefty one. Other times, it's used as a sharp stick of irony or parody.
Nearly every country has what's called a country-coded top level domain
extension -- in lay terms, the end of a web address. In Canada, the .ca
domain comes with rules enforced by the Canadian Internet Registration
Authority. CIRA's dispute resolution policy has squashed 38 cybersquatters
in three years, involving corporations such as Amazon.ca or
Sleepcountrycanada.ca. But the rules generally apply to trademarked or
copyrighted names rather than the names of individual people, which are
considered fair use for all.
The larger question is whether cybersquatting is a form of identity theft, a
violation of personal integrity: Should the law allow someone else to
impersonate and misrepresent you, even in virtual space?
Mr. Boudria said he will apply to get his name back. But CIRA president
Bernard Turcotte said politicians benefit from no more name protection than an
ordinary citizen.
Celebrities, always anything but ordinary citizens, have had considerably more
success in reclaiming their names from cybersquatters. Actor Morgan
Freeman appealed to the World Intellectual Property Organization, a United
Nations agency, last month and successfully won back
www.morganfreeman.com
from a company using it as a search engine. Julia Roberts, Nicole Kidman
and Madonna have beat back cybersquatters as well.
The power of Internet-domain regulation currently lies in Marina del Ray,
Calif., where the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers holds
court over the domain-name industry. ICANN gets its authority from the
U.S. Department of Commerce, yet also controls approvals for the more than 250
country-specific domains, such as .ca, .eu, and .uk.
The United Nations and its International Telecommunications Union have been
vying to wrestle control away from ICANN and place it in the hands of the
international community. But whatever the outcome of the international
power struggle, it is unlikely to alter the problem facing Canadian MPs.
The politicians face an uphill battle to reclaim the ground they have already
lost on-line.
Rob Shaw is a writer for The Globe and Mail's Report on
Business.
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
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