That’s the question posed by the actions Lib Dem candidate for Bishop Auckland:
One of the contenders for the Bishop Auckland seat, sitting MP Helen Goodman, accused Liberal Democrat opponent Mark Wilkes of aggression after he bought the rights to use helengoodman.org.uk as a website address.
Mr Wilkes, a Durham county councillor, also bought two domain names relating to independent liberal Sam Zair and on Friday added one for Tory Barbara Harrison.
Mr Wilkes said he had not decided how to use the site names, and added: “We have bought four names. They cost next to nothing – two or three pounds a year – but I am still working out what the best options are.
“We have to make sure that we get our message over to people who are searching the internet to find out about the General Election.
“It does not mean that we are not talking directly to people as well. We have already delivered 32,000 Christmas cards in the constituency and I will be meeting as many people as possible.”
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6 Comments
A prime example is http://www.mydavidcameron.com – I am fairly sure this wasnt setup by the tories… and they also bought http://www.mygordonbrown.com which forwards to the first site mentioned here.
http://www.mynickclegg.com however was acquired by one of our own 🙂
Keep up the good work out there folks.
@JasonJHunter
Sorry, but this sort of behaviour is silly and can only create negative publicity. I would go so far as to say that Sandra Gidley owes her majority (125 votes) to the negative publicity caused by the behaviour of the Tory candidate for Winchester, George Hollingbery, in doing the same thing to Mark Oaten, thus reminding the electorate of mid-Hampshire of the obnoxious public school twerp side to many Conservatives.
I think you will find they stopped this about 2 years ago.
If the persons name is purchased , that person can ask for that name from them.
1. The law can be twisted to violate free speech. I suspect this is the reason the law was written in the first place. A politician was probably mad that someone else owned her domain name. The bill specifically states that, in order to violate the law, the sole purpose of the domain registration must be to sell it. But I can already see how this will work. Someone registers a politician’s name, attacks the politician on the site, and then the politician approaches the domain owner to buy the domain. If the registrant responds to the request then this law will be invoked. Also, the law would prohibit someone from selling a domain to another person. For example, John registers the name of a right wing politician that is pro-life. A leftist organization approaches John wanting to buy the domain to use as an outlet to attack the politician for his political views. The proposed law would forbid this.
Irrespective of the legality, this is just childish.
This has been a problem for a long time but it has sort of faded away. I would advise anyone worried about it not to because it takes a lot of work to keep track of all possible domain names with a certain name. If that domain name appear on the search results pages and is competing for exposure, then a C&D letter is in order but only then.