Washington - Harvard student Ben Edelman was searching on the Internet for a bicycle repair shop, but stumbled instead onto "Tina's Live Webcam," a hard-core pornography site.
There was no mistake: Edelman had clicked through to www.bicyclebill.com, but the website registration of the local bike shop had expired, and was quickly grabbed by the Canadian operator of the sexually explicit website.
Edelman, 22, did not take matters lying down: he investigated and found that Domain Strategy of Montreal, which operates the webcam porn site, had snatched up more than 4 000 domain names that had expired.
"This rubbed me the wrong way," Edelman said. "It inspired me to see what Tina's live webcam was up to."
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| 'Some people would absolutely call it blackmail, but it's not illegal' |
The phenomenon dubbed "porn-napping" has happened to churches, schools, local governments and others that fail to renew their website registrations.
The new owners generally offer to sell the names back to their original owners - for anywhere from $500 to $2 000 (about R5 000 to R20 000) - in what could be a lucrative strategy, but what some call extortion or blackmail.
In the meantime, the hijacked sites continue to direct users to porn or gambling sites, or to pages that simply say "this domain for sale".
"Some people would absolutely call it blackmail, but it's not illegal," said Art Wolinsky, a New Jersey consultant who operates the Online Internet Institute.
"If you don't re-register a name it becomes available" to anyone who wants to buy it.
Registering a domain name normally costs about $35, but some registrars offer discounts that put the price under $10, Wolinsky said.
Website "hijackers" often sell the names back at around $550 - just under the $600 that would have to be paid for dispute resolution by Internet governing authorities.
Wolinsky said some 40 000 expired domain names were grabbed by porn-nappers or others under a loophole - since closed - that allowed someone to return a site for a refund after five days. This allowed the new owners several days to negotiate a sale with the original owner.
He said paying off the porn-nappers can encourage further hijackings; but for some, the cost is lower than hiring a lawyer to get the name back.
"The best advice is not to put yourself in that position, to re-register the name," he said.
David Burt, a spokesperson for N2H2, an Internet filtering company, said porn-napping came to his attention because the firm noticed sexually-explicit content on some previously innocuous websites - sites operated by the Cape Cod History Society and the International Lutheran Woman's Missionary League, for example.
"Most of these sites are schools, churches and civic organizations that don't have their name trademarked" and thus would have a tougher time making a case to get the name back.
"What I find most disturbing is that a lot of these links are put into sites for children, so a child can click on that and be exposed to hardcore porn."
Other victims include a US Navy recruiting site taken over by a "free porn" website; and the city government site of Bensalem, Pennsylvania, taken over by Max Kopisov of Ekaterinburg, Russia, which directs users to a German-owned porn site.
Burt said some of the porn-nappers have been traced to places such as Armenia and South Korea, making it more difficult for US organisations to sue them.
Mary Hewitt, a spokesperson for the Internet Corporation For Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the organisation governing the Internet, said there were no statistics on the numbers of hijacked websites but that the group had received many complaints.
Hewitt said the practice is not illegal, although some authorities, notably in the United States, could prosecute someone for blackmail if it could prove a site was registered with that intent.
ICANN is studying a proposal to give website owners a 30-day grace period before expired domain names are opened up to new buyers, Hewitt said.
Edelman recommends a 90-day grace period that would keep expired names out of the hands of resellers.
"The right policy lets the original registrant get the domain name back," he said. - Sapa-AFP
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