Some of the Internet's biggest names came to last weekend's e-summit@virginia and discussed the dangers and potentials of the Digital Age. This seems appropriate, considering that buying and selling big names is now big business. Lawmakers and tech industry experts are struggling to find the best way to handle cybersquatters: People who buy the rights to Internet names in order to sell them to the highest bidder. While a lot of Internet companies have yet to turn a dollar in profit, the right name can be priceless. Just ask George W. Bush.
Visitors to gwbush.com initially may wonder why the Republican presidential hopeful would ever adopt the campaign slogans "Hypocrisy With Bravado," and "Drug-Free Since 1974!" The answer is that he didn't: The official Bush Web site is actually georgewbush.com. But since rules and regulations haven't kept pace with the Internet's evolution, there's nothing preventing a satirist from buying the G.W. Bush name for the sole purpose of lampooning the Texas governor and criticizing his performance. And it's not clear if any law could have protected the candidate from this spoof; after all, since no reasonable person could confuse the parody for the official site, why shouldn't gwbush.com be an appropriate name for a forum devoted to criticizing a major political figure? For now, unless the government intervenes, Bush will have to pay if he wants his name back.
It seems the Internet's greatest virtue is also its worst problem: Information on the Web may be free, but good old-fashioned reputations can be worth millions. In older, more established media, publishers and artists are held accountable for the quality of their material because their reputations are at stake. The most successful names in news and entertainment are the ones that stand for consistency and reliability: Audiences know that just about any Hitchcock movie will be a great thriller, just as any Barry White song will feature the words "Oooh, baby." On the other hand, as Geraldo "Al Capone's Vault" Rivera knows, one false move in the public eye can tarnish an entire career.
There are also plenty of reasons why a company might try to distance itself from its image. Money, for instance. A violent movie like "Pulp Fiction" would have shredded Disney's family-friendly reputation, so the Magic Kingdom hid behind its Miramax alter-ego and safely earned millions. These corporate masquerades can be hard to sustain, though, since it's relatively easy to find out who's really behind the brand names we see.
The problem with the Internet is that if you want a good reputation, you can just buy a good name. In cyberspace, people can get away with the most greed-driven, underhanded marketing schemes as long as they can afford to buy fresh reputations. Online, advertisers can rent the personas of educators, doctors and other authority figures. For instance, Depression-info.com seems like a wonderful source for unbiased information on clinical depression, but it just happens to be owned by the same company that makes Zoloft. While their claims might be perfectly legitimate, they would be easier to trust if their authors didn't bury their real names in fine print.
Just like any other medium, people will never trust information on the Internet if they can't trust the information providers. Without that trust, Web surfers will continue to wonder if msnbc.com can fairly cover the Microsoft trial, or if richardwallacesmith.com is the best site for local legal news.
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