[WEB4LIB] Re: Lapsed domain names--beware

[JENNIFER A. HEISE]

>     I heartily agree. I do get kind of sick of hearing some of these people whine
> about how their TLD was "stolen" by a porn site or whatever. The problem is that
> the TLD was never stolen. You can't steal something no one owns. And if a site
> doesn't re-up their TLD and/or doesn't pay the bills, they lose possession and
> thus ownership of the TLD. So it's available for a porn site to snag on the cheap
> and maybe generate some traffic for their sites.

If all they were doing was victimizing the web site owners, I'm not sure
I would care. But the truth is, because of their intent to blackmail,
they are victimizing the people who use the web. Any time I am trying to
help a patron use the web, I need to live with the fact that any inquiry
can be hijacked to a porn site, with the intention of obtaining money
from the former owner of that name by sexally harrassing people going to
the site.

The people who aren't bothered by this, I suspect, have never been
working with a female patron and had the site(s) come up. 

With all the hoo-ha about porn and sexual harrassment, it's a pity the
Family-Friendly Libraries and the American so-called Family Association
doesn't put their effort into attacking these people instead of making
us responsible for their horrible purient children.

-- Jenne Heise