Bloomberg: “Candidates Continue to Miss Obvious Domain Registrations”

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Bloomberg just published another post on presidential candidates and the domain names they failed to register.

In a post BNA.com calls out Jeb Bush for failing to register the matching domain of his  “new campaign slogan–“Jeb Can Fix It!”

“Jimmy Flanagan, a 2014 candidate for the Austin, Texas, City Council, had registered the domain name out from under the candidate.”

“Bush isn’t alone.

While no startup company nowadays would launch without making sure it owned its own name online, candidates for the highest political office in the U.S. clearly haven’t gotten the message:

  • Carly Fiorina failed to register carlyfiorina.org, which was registered by an individual who used it to post statistics on layoffs during Fiorina’s time as Hewlett-Packard CEO
  • Ted Cruz failed to register TedCruz.com, which points to a banner urging people to support President Barack Obama’s immigration reform proposals. Neither did the Cruz campaign register TedCruzforAmerica.com, which redirects to the homepage of the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBT organization.
  • Mike Huckabee doesn’t own mikehuckabee.org, which points to pictures purportedly showing Huckabee’s expensive beach house;
  • Jim Webb owns jimwebb.com, but it’s the Jim Webb who’s a freelance web developer, not the former Democratic presidential; and
  • Bernie Sanders could perhaps be forgiven for not thinking to register berniesanders.ninja, although–fortunately for Sanders– a supporter did.BNA sites only one candidate for being ahead of the curve by registering not just his own name but a disparaging domain as well; Donaldtrumpsucks.com is registered to the General Counsel of the Trump Organization, according to online records.

    While no campaign could be expected to figure out every possible domain name that might be used to disparage their candidate, making sure to register slogans and basic variations should be high on their basic checklists of due diligence items.”

    Once again another story about elections and domains fails to mention any new gTLD’s including .GOP, .Democrat, .Republican, .Vote or .Voting.

    FYI Trump.sucks and DonaldTrump.sucks are reserved

About Michael Berkens

Michael Berkens, Esq. is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of TheDomains.com. Michael is also the co-founder of Worldwide Media Inc. which sold around 70K domain to Godaddy.com in December 2015 and now owns around 8K domain names . Michael was also one of the 5 Judges selected for the the Verisign 30th Anniversary .Com contest.

Comments

  2. Joseph Peterson says

    “While no startup company nowadays would launch without making sure it owned its own name online … ”

    Mike, I wish that were true. Last year, I turned away a client as a buyer broker whose boss (the ceo) planned to announce their new brand name publicly on Monday. Meanwhile they were asking me – on Friday! –  if I’d help negotiate the purchase of the domain name they wanted, which was owned by a competing company within the same industry. They didn’t own ANY version of their intended brand name.

    And the rebrand they were announcing was a step downward, to boot!