Are politicians who don’t know the first thing about registering domain names fit to govern?
This case in Pittsburgh is one of the funniest political domain name faux paus of all time.
Here are the players:
-State Rep. Jeff Habay, R-Shaler, incumbent.
-Funeral director Frank Perman, bidding to unseat Habay
The domain name hilarity started when Perman decided to register Perman-Now.com for use in a mailing in his bid to unseat Habay. Why Perman registered a domain with a hyphen is beyond me. But he also neglected to register PermanNow.com without the hyphen. Perman sent the mailers to registered voters and neglected to include the hyphen. This led potential voters to the PermanNow.com domain, which was unregistered at the time. Someone registered PermanNow.com (perhaps Habay, see below) and created a web site with a number of allegations about Perman.
What makes the whole issue even more humorous is that Perman went to the media and the attorney general thinking his web site was hacked. The Pittsburge Tribune-Review even wrote an article about the hacking. In the article, Perman said:
“If it wasn’t for the serious legal implications, this would be humorous,” Perman said. “This issue has already been turned over to the proper legal authorities.”
The only serious legal implementation was that Perman clearly didn’t know what he was doing. Heck, he couldn’t even remember his own web address!
A recent followup article in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review says that Habay was the registrant of PermanNow.com. I looked up previous WhoIs records on the domain. It was originally registered using a domain privacy service. Then on 12/14/05 the WhoIs record shows Habay. The domain record now shows a different registrant in Sri Lanka (maybe a fake name?).
As for FrankPerman.com? Perman apparently neglected to register that as well. It currently points to the same information as PermanNow.com and is registered using a domain privacy service.
Leave a Comment