At the beginning of the year, President Barack Obama's new 501(c)4 political nonprofit, Organizing For Action, was launched with all the usual bells and whistles. But the tech wizards at OFA forgot one important rule in today's Internet world: Register all the iterations of your website address before someone else does.
Now Obama's team is filing complaints against the folks smart enough to get the addresses before he did.
As Obama's OFA made its debut, no one in his purportedly Internet-savvy campaign had obtained the corresponding .com, .net, .org or .us sites, nor did OFA register other names that are close to its official one, as is the sensible practice. In the case of the .net address, a fellow named Derek Bovard had already registered the .net address by the time Obama's team took notice.
Bovard has routed his new site to the homepage of the National Rifle Association.
So, whenever anyone goes to
www.organizingforaction.net they end up seeing the homepage of the NRA.
Naturally, Obama and his fellow community organizers were furious. So furious, in fact, that they have replied by filing complaints against Bovard--and, apparently, a variety of other people who had registered domain names that OFA now wants.
Obama's group filed the complaints with the authority that governs website domain addresses, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). The complaints were filed under Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) rules. Obama's case number is 1483257 and was filed on Feb 6. UDRP cases are usually decided within one to two months after first filing.
