Bush for president (not)

by Michelle Chihara

At first glance, http://www.gwbush.com looks like the official site for White House hopeful George W. Bush, complete with hokey photos and star-spangled color scheme. A second glance, however, reveals something else: tongue-in-cheek copy about Bush's efforts to "take on excessive freedom on the Internet." There are mentions of his drug-addled past, his coziness with corporate America. The site is a weird and wicked satire run by Zack Exler, a 29-year-old Somerville computer consultant who registered the domain name gwbush.com back in December of 1998, "just because it was available."

The candidate himself was less than amused; he has filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) and has even held a press conference, at which he called Exler a "garbage man" and said that "there should be limits to freedom."

But for now, all Bush can do is bluster while the FEC ruminates. Thanks to the Internet's first-come, first-served system for allocating domain names, Exler can put what he wants on gwbush.com. "With no resources," he says, "we've been able to build a political satire on the Web and have a million people see it."

This kind of conflict is spurring changes in the way the Net handles its domain names. By September 2000, the government will hand the job of registering domains to a new nonprofit organization called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). The organization, headed by cyber-pundit Esther Dyson, met last weekend in Berlin in part to determine how such disagreements will be resolved in the future -- whether George W. Bush is entitled to gwbush.com, for example, or whether Tiger Electronics is entitled to furby.com.

ICANN hasn't settled on the specifics yet. But critics fear that when it does, the little guys -- programmers in Somerville, for example -- will get shortchanged. They fear that the current proposal for conflict resolution favors well-funded trademark holders over non-commercial interests and individuals. "The US government is taking domain names and IP addresses and handing them over to some unknown party in the private sector," says technology activist Ronda Hauben, who sees ICANN as far too indebted to commercial forces.

For now, though, the new rules are at least a year away, and Zack Exler isn't worried.

"If George actually succeeds in getting the Federal Election Commission to rule against us, he's gonna be in trouble. If every little supporter of Bush -- everyone who says 'Go Bush' in any shape or form -- will have to register with the FEC . . . then I know quite a few lawyers who'll be interested in pursuing that."