Election season in the U.S. has always involved tons of money spent on TV and radio ads that politicians buy usually to slam their opponents. Over the last decade more and more politicians are using the Internet to bring eyes to their campaign. One strategy of political campaigns is to register domains of their opponents first+last names. These domains are being used to redirect to their own homepage or are developed into sites filled with information against their opponent. Along with Twitter and Facebook, campaigning online is fairly cheap and becoming very effective. It’s no surprise that every year more and more of these types of sites are popping up.
A recent survey by CADNA.org reports that less than half of U.S. Senators and Representatives own their FullName.com. Even fewer (20-30%) politicians own the .org version of their name. The .org version seems to be the most popular extension for opposing politicians to register. This is the best choice for two reasons – Of course, the .com is likely already long gone and the .org extension almost naturally gives the site some sort of credibility. Below is a CBSNews video report on “Cyber-squatting” Midterm Elections
The New York Times also recently focused on this trend with their article “Clicking Candidate.com, Landing at Opponent.com“. I intentionally did not cite any domain names being used by politicians this year.
