To avoid disputes over domain names claimed by cybersquatters, a report in The Washington Post says ICANN should approve the new gTLD of .POL. The claim comes about following a number of high profile cases where cybersquatters have registered domain names for politicians about to embark on campaigns for office, the latest high profile one being Meg Whitman’s bid to become the governor of California.
Whitman, according to the reports, has spent much of the last year trying to reclaim “her” domain names. The report says:
Her early attempts to negotiate failed, and she lost an Internet arbitration because her extensive business and political activities did not make her name “commercial” enough to warrant protection. She then initiated costly and potentially fruitless litigation that, had events run their course, might have concluded after California’s gubernatorial election. In the end, though, Whitman’s substantial checkbook solved her problem. She settled with the cybersquatter out of court for an undisclosed sum.
The report says:
A “.pol” domain would reduce cybersquatters’ economic incentives to hoard candidate sites because candidates’ easy access to “.pol” sites would undercut cybersquatters’ ransom price for similarly named sites ending in .com, .net and .org.
The article is written by Matthew T. Sanderson, a political law attorney at Caplin & Drysdale in Washington, and is available from The Washington Post at www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/10/AR2009041002955.html. A longer version of this proposal was published and is available on subscription in the February issue of the Election Law Journal. See liebertpub.com/products/product.aspx?pid=101.