Chat Room -When Good Web Sites Go Bad

Here's one of those stories that shakes your faith if you have an optimistic, positive view of human nature. It's particularly hard to read if you work with kids and their parents and worry about what they see online.

But first, some necessary background information. Whenever someone establishes a domain, such as www.mydomain.com, they purchase the rights to that domain name for two years. At the end of that time, those who purchased the rights to that domain must renew it or it becomes available for others to purchase. There are different reasons someone might let a domain name lapse—the company goes out of business, they decide to change domains, or they simply forget to pay the fee on time. In the past when this happened, users of sites—such as those run by schools and libraries—that linked to those domains would get a "the page cannot be found" message when they clicked on the link. It was irritating, but no big deal.

But recently a person or a group of people, based in some of the nations of the former Soviet Union, has been watching for lapsed domains to which many other sites link and then snatching them up. The new owners put up pages that contains pornographic messages as well as the message, "This Domain Is for Sale." Some people who have had their domains grabbed call it legal extortion.

I heard about this grabbing of domains for the first time in May, when Home Education magazine, a publication for homeschooling parents, changed its domain name from www.home-ed-press.com to www.home-ed-magazine.com. For several years, the home-ed-press site had been considered one of the best homeschooling sites, and many other sites—including many library sites supporting homeschoolers—linked to it. Rights to the name lapsed without the publisher's knowledge, and one day, someone clicking on a link to home-ed-press.com arrived at a site with a large "ENTER" in the center of the screen. When the visitor clicked on it, window after window of adult images piled up, almost too quickly to close them. Soon after, Home Education magazine issued a press release stating that "the old home-ed-press URL is currently linked to a company in Armenia." It asked anyone linking to the old address to please change the link to point to the new one.

Recently, other domains have been grabbed up in the same way. Webmolecules.com, a software company site that offered chemistry students images of various molecules, was linked from many lists of recommended K–12 sites. It recently vanished, reappearing with "adult" messages.

Leonard Bergenstein, the owner of a Cleveland graphic design firm, who is also a volunteer for SCBWI, the Society for Children's Book Writers and Illustrators, designed pages for a number of well-known children's authors and illustrators. Bergenstein put these literary pages online under his domain name, www.bergenstein.com. They included a site for Nancy Garden, who wrote The Year They Burned the Books (Farrar, 1999) and Holly's Secret (Farrar, 2000), both of which prominently featured the URL of her Web site on the book jacket. Nancy Van Laan, author of So Say the Little Monkeys (Atheneum, 1998) and When Winter Comes (Atheneum, 2000), also had a bergenstein.com site. Bergenstein claims that his Internet service provider neglected to let him know when his domain name registration had lapsed. The bergenstein.com domain was purchased by a Russian group that posted pornographic messages on it, along with a prominent message: "This Domain Is for Sale." The asking price was much higher than Bergenstein originally paid to register the domain. He hinted that he might take legal action, but would give no details.

In the meantime, Farrar recalled all copies of Holly's Secret and suspended delivery of copies to libraries and bookstores until new book jackets—without the offending URL—were printed. Garden asks librarians to please remove the www.bergenstein.com URL if they see it on the jacket of any of her books. "I am, of course, extremely concerned about my young readers," she says. "It horrifies me to think that they could go to what they think is my site and find pornography…. Until there are strong laws protecting against this sort of thing on the Internet—laws, I hasten to say, that do not violate the First Amendment—and efficient ways of enforcing those laws, it appears the only defense authors and other Web site owners have is to make sure their domain names never lapse." Unfortunately, given the present state of the Net, this is easier said than done.