Downtown city councillor finds her domain name cybersquatted

By Patrick Lejtenyi

Downtown city councillor Louise O'Sullivan left Mayor G?rald Tremblay's Montreal Island Citizens' Union (UCIM) party in February, sitting as an independent and vowing to create her own for this November's elections. That she has. Her Team Ville-Marie party is planning to run candidates in the downtown and downtown-adjacent boroughs like C?te-des-Neiges and the Plateau, and the party's Web site, www.equipevillemarie.com, is up and running (although it remains a work in progress).

The trouble is, her new UCIM opponent, former Board of Trade of Metropolitan Montreal CEO and Paul Martin adviser Beno?t Labont?, also has a Web site. Not only is his more sophisticated, but, she alleges, it's also cyber-squatting O'Sullivan's domain name. By changing the top level domain to .org, .net, .info, .ca, or by inserting a hyphen between "ville" and "marie" in the Web address (for instance, www.equipeville-marie.com), visitors are automatically redirected to www.benoitlabonte.org - which features the smiling, thoughtful visage of O'Sullivan's rival.

This has O'Sullivan steamed. "This is confusing to voters and it isn't transparent democracy," she says. "This administration said it would be a transparent one, but instead they're playing dirty hockey."

O'Sullivan says she had been in touch with Labont? through her lawyers, asking that he sell her back the domain names he had claimed. Late last month, she says he agreed and offered to sell them for $1,500. She sent him a certified cheque, but then was informed she could have the domain names back only if she kept the settlement confidential.

"It didn't take me 30 seconds to say, ?No way, Jos?,'" says O'Sullivan. "They want to keep this confidential? They were caught with their hand in the cookie jar!" Eventually, the cheque was returned.

A representative from Labont?'s campaign was unavailable for comment by presstime. But legally, according to the provincial government, Labont? and his party haven't done anything wrong. Denis Dion, a media rep for the Directeur g?n?ral des ?lections du Qu?bec (DGEQ), the provincial body governing elections throughout the province, says there are no laws or regulations against cybersquatting. "The best she can do is have a lawyer send them a cease-and-desist order," he says. Dion admits he's "never heard of anything like this before," but says the DGEQ won't get involved in the case.

O'Sullivan says she's never heard of a similar incident either. However, cybersquatting certainly isn't a new phenomenon. Zack Exley, who would go on to form the anti-Bush Web site www.moveon.org, first squatted www.gwbush.com in 1999, using the site to post doctored photos of the future president as a bourbon-and-blow aficionado. Exley went on to work for Tony Blair's re-election campaign this year, and British Conservatives found Web sites with the name of their leader, Michael Howard, registered by the Labour Party. Online pornographers have been at it longer. But O'Sullivan says there's no denying poor netiquette may hurt in the long run.

"He's doing democracy an injustice," she says. "But this is going to hurt him more than it hurts me. I am going to make political hay out of this."