But she may not find it too funny. Republican NY State Assemblywoman Jane Corwin is running for Congress “because our nation is in crisis” on janecorwin.com but on janecorwin.org? She’s running “because she has a shitload of money” .
Evidently Ms. Corwin only registered dot com leaving the dot org open for a her opponent, Ian Murphy, to create, in his words “a more honest website”. By honest he means hilariously funny. The dot org version is an exact replica of the original but a few slogans and captions may have been changed. It’s drawn a lot of attention to the importance of domain owners registering all the major tlds and at the same time showing the perils of all the new tlds being released. While a few thousand dollars may not be a lot in the scope of a Congressional run, it’s just one more thing for someone to do and manage in a sea of today’s costly races.
If there’s any lesson to be learned from all this it’s if you are going to buy a domain for political reasons, make sure to especially secure the dot org.
Don’t really agree with you because she can take down the .org with lawsuit claiming scam, copyright…, using her name…. Also even if she did reg all tlds, her opponent still can get a .com with her name in +another keyword.
What’s important is ranking to the top, so .com is great for it.
I’m of the opinion that 99% of defensive registrations are pointless, but politics is very different than commerce.
There was an article in Roll Call a while back about Rick Santorum’s legendary “google problem” and that being a potentially catastrophic dynamic in a presidential campaign.
In politics, it’s probably wise to undertake a few hundred bucks worth of defensive registrations during a political campaign, thus forcing any hit sites deep into the keyword backwaters. At a minimum, you’re reducing any ‘intuitive credibility’ the might have by using a strong domain (like YouName.org) and forcing them onto something like YourNameSucksBad.com.
There was a pretty strong theory- that came out shortly after the advent of color television- about how human psyche processed color TV and it being much different than how it interacted with black and white. The theory was that unlike black and white, where there was a baked-in psychological ‘barrier’ between the B&W images and the brain, color TV presented images that were not all that dissimilar to what we saw in real life, thus were much more powerful and had a significantly capacity to persuade the subconscious.
This is probably not too far off why I’d much rather see a hit site on (YourName)IsHorrible.com as opposed to YouName.org. The former is in black and white, while the later is in color.