Washington, Sep 15 (IANS) It’s a campaign with a difference. Candidates in the Senate election in the US have launched their websites in the names of opposition party leaders.
Sharron Angle, the Republican candidate for the Senate in Nevada, has the site BobMenendez.com, which her campaign uses to bash her opponent, the New York Times reported Wednesday.
Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey is the chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.
The web page for Senator Robert Menendez, BobMenendez.com, goes to Sharronangle.com, a site supporting the Republican challenger to Senator Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada and the majority leader.
A campaign site for a Democratic candidate, Brad Ellsworth, bradellsworth.org, leads to badforindiana.com, an Indiana Republican Party site that is critical of Ellsworth.
A survey by the Coalition Against Domain Name Abuse, a Washington-based trade group, has found that lawmakers are not as conscious of their online images as they ought to be.
Not quite half of US senators and 40 percent of representatives own what the report called their FullName.com domain names. The numbers were lower – 32 percent of senators and 22 percent of representatives – when it came to their FullName.org names.
Only one lawmaker in Washington, Senator Jon Tester, Democrat of Montana, owns at least six different websites associated with his name, along with the .gov site given to him by the government, the study found. One of those sites, however, JonTester.com, was bought for an undisclosed sum this year from an individual who had grabbed it up before the senator did.
The report is aimed at focusing lawmakers’ attention on a practice known as cybersquatting, in which individuals buy up domain names and then use them to extract money or engage in mischief.
