Online business pioneer Whitman fights for Web sites with her name

Meg Whitman, the former CEO of eBay, hasn't said whether she will run for governor of California in 2010.But the woman who guided the growth of one of the Internet's biggest success stories has run into an early online stumbling block: A cybersquatter has snatched up a series of potentially valuable domains such as whitmanforgovernor.com, meg2010.com and whitman2010.com.Now, the former eBay chief is petitioning the equivalent of an international Internet court to get those domain names back -- a sure sign the potential politician who's played coy about her own political ambitions is taking a serious look at the race. On Oct. 15, Whitman filed a petition with the World Intellectual Property Organization to claim rightful ownership of five Web addresses, or URLs. They are: megwhitmanforgovernor.com, megwhitman2010.com, meg2010.com, whitmanforgovernor.com, and whitman2010.com.The domains were purchased by a person named Thomas Hall, of Los Angeles, beginning on Jan. 28 -- only three days after the first news report that Whitman might run for governor. Via e-mail, Hall said he bought the domains "on a lark."That changed in June, Hall said, when Whitman's attorneys contacted him."They demanded I turn over ownership to them," he said. "They have since offered to buy them, and to be honest, because of the way I have been treated, I don't want to sell."So Team Whitman is taking Hall to an Internet court, of sorts. The pursuit of those domains won't be cheap, say Internet dispute experts. No information is available about Steve DelBianco, executive director of NetChoice, a coalition of companies dedicated to maintaining rules to govern the Internet, said appealing for ownership of a domain name "costs $6,000 and more typically $10,000" through the Uniform Domain Name Dispute-Resolution Policy, or UDRP.There's no guarantee of victory. In fact, winning can be a long shot for individuals without trademarked names, said Doug Isenberg, an Atlanta-based attorney who specializes in domain-name disputes.He pointed to singer Bruce Springsteen, who lost a similar case before the World Intellectual Property Organization, or WIPO, in 2001 when he tried to claim Bruce-Springsteen.com.The cheapest option is often to simply pay off the cyber squatter or simply find another domain, said Isenberg, who sometimes serves as an arbiter in WIPO cases.All this comes while Whitman, a senior adviser to Republican Sen. John McCain's presidential bid, has downplayed her own political ambitions. She has said it is too early to speculate about her political future, insisting she was focused on McCain's election. McCain had mentioned Whitman as a potential member of his cabinet.Mitch Zak, a Republican strategist working with Whitman, said her advisers are "definitely pursuing URLs to give Meg options should she choose to run for governor."Earlier this year, Whitman settled a long-standing fight for megwhitman.com. She had filed a similar petition for that domain name, but the case was settled outside of the arbitration process, presumably with some type of cash settlement. Details are not publicly available, and Zak declined to share any information on the settlement."She's got Megwhitman.com, which is probably the most valuable of the domain names," said Isenberg.Cybersquatters make money in two ways. First, they "park" advertising on the pages. That can be valuable for a popular domain that receives a high traffic level. Second, and often much more fruitfully, they snatch up valuable online locales and then resell them. Buying a domain in the first place costs as little as $10 per year."The bad guys learned about this issue of the Internet before the good guys did," said Isenberg.Zak said he didn't see the irony in the ex-high tech executive Whitman being victimized."Cybersquatting in business and politics is designed solely to generate revenue," he said. "And when you're high-profile like Meg Whitman and led a successful company like eBay, people will seek to financially benefit from that." E-mail Sacramento Bee reporter Shane Goldmacher at sgoldmacher(at)sacbee.com(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)