Whose City Is It Anyway? : Internet: Private companies hope to profit with Huntington Beach and Laguna Beach ‘home pages’ on the World Wide Web, but some municipal officials object, want disclaimers.
Computer users who call up this city’s electronic address on the Internet can view a list of municipal utilities, a local business directory and a photo of “this week’s beach girl”--all alongside Huntington Beach’s official logo.
It looks like a document right out of City Hall. But the city has no connection to the electronic page.
A similar page appears under a Laguna Beach letterhead. It includes a community calender, a directory of hotels and a questionnaire that invites browsers to provide such personal information as addresses and phone numbers.
Despite their official appearance, both offerings were produced by private companies looking to profit by providing basic city information on the World Wide Web, a popular Internet destination that features flashy graphics, color photographs and easy access.
The small companies that produce the Huntington Beach and Laguna Beach documents--known as home pages--are hoping to lure commercial advertisers. The creator of the Laguna Beach page says he also hopes the questionnaire will generate marketable information about users.
Users ranging from blue-chip companies to hobbyists are rushing to publish pages on the increasingly popular Web to display products, services and hobbies to millions of Internet browsers. But this new high-tech information arena is also proving difficult to control.
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Many large cities, including Los Angeles, produce their own home pages on the Web, while cities such as Anaheim and Brea have created pages with the help of private computer companies. But other cities are finding that private companies are producing city pages on their own, often providing information from flyers produced by city hall.
Some public officials object to the privately produced pages. While they say they do not want to limit the flow of information readily available from chambers of commerce, school district offices and city halls, they are concerned when the information appears under official city letterheads or logos, giving the appearance that the cities themselves produced it.
“I think there’s a responsibility to put a disclaimer on it that this page is in no way affiliated or connected to the city of Huntington Beach,” deputy city manager Richard Barnard said. The city is considering whether to take legal action against Expressware, the company that produces the Huntington Beach home page, he said.
The entrepreneurs respond that they are only reproducing information that is readily available to the public.
“You don’t have to get the city’s permission to write a book about Santa Barbara, so why do you have to get permission to do a Web page about Santa Barbara?” said Ron Dolin.
Dolin is president of Internet Cafe, a company that has produced a page about the city and county of Santa Barbara since last December. The page includes business listings, bus schedules and a history of the city.
Dolin said he hopes to raise revenue by selling advertising on the page.
“The only thing that matters about a page is whether it’s interesting enough that people keep looking at it, not who builds it,” Dolin said. “It’s supposed to be functional chaos.”
Jason Pilon, the creator of the Laguna Beach page and questionnaire, said that he first approached city administrators and the city-subsidized visitors bureau about setting up a city-sanctioned electronic page. After failing to generate much interest, he said, he created a page using the city’s name alongside a logo of his company, Telesync Internet Services.
“We had to peddle ourselves, so we came out and offered a lot of free information about the city,” Pilon said. Much of the material comes from information sheets he picked up at the Chamber of Commerce, Pilon said.
“I wouldn’t mind putting a disclaimer on if they wanted me to, but I’d like to work with the city myself,” he said.
Laguna Beach City Clerk Verna L. Rollinger said the city plans a $25,000 electronic bulletin board of its own, but the system will not be funded until next year at the earliest.
“We’d object to anybody who’s trying to pass themselves off as the city,” Rollinger said. “I hope that no one is confused by [Telesync’s] presentation or misled into the belief that it represents the city government, because it doesn’t.”
On-line name appropriation is familiar to many companies, who have often found outsiders registering their names on a national Internet directory.
A company in Huntsville, Ala., for example, has registered the name of Irvine-based Taco Bell Corp. as “tacobell.com.” Taco Bell officials say they are reviewing the matter.
But public agencies do not have the same legal protection as private companies. Last year, for example, Huntington Beach’s attorney decided the city could not sue a vendor who was reproducing the city’s logo on T-shirts.
Similarly, in a case that is receiving national attention, a Bellevue, Wash., student is threatening to sue his school district for disciplining him for putting a parody of his high school on-line. The student’s ACLU lawyers plan to argue, among other things, that school officials have no right to censor information about their institution that appears on-line.
Don Passman, a Beverly Hills entertainment lawyer who specializes in on-line legal issues, said that cities and other public agencies might be able to argue that the unauthorized publication of their names and logos violates trademark laws.
“If somebody calls himself ‘Beverly Hills garage,’ nobody thinks that the city owns it,” Passman said. “But if it’s something that gives the impression that it’s sponsored by the city, like ‘Beverly Hills library,’ then maybe you’ve crossed the line or, at least, you’re in no-man’s land, because a lot of this hasn’t been tested” in courts.
A few companies that run Internet directories have begun to list city-sanctioned Web pages separately from those that private outfits produce on their own.
But it may be at least a year before that practice becomes common, said Kevin Altis, founder of a Portland, Ore., company that runs an on-line geographic listing service, Citynet. In the meantime, users should be wary of what they are calling up, Altis said.
“Whenever you call up some site, you should think about what it is you’re looking at before you assume it’s from the city government itself,” Altis said.
Ultimately, both the cities and the marketing companies agree, the quality of information that is offered on the home pages will determine their popularity.
In Huntington Beach, Expressware owner Dann Jones said he hopes to expand his pages into a general-interest resource for city residents and potential tourists by taking classified advertisements and listing more information about the city.
The “beach girls of the week” are not Huntington Beach residents, Jones said.
“I get a little flak for the beach girl,” said Jones, who acknowledged that the images actually come from a computer disk of models’ photographs that he bought. “But I just got some e-mail from a woman asking for a beach hunk of the week too.”
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Web Primer
The Internet global network allows millions of computers to communicate over high-speed telephone lines. The computers, known as “servers,” can store and exchange data, photographs and text and are increasingly being used to transmit more advanced audio and video signals as well. Home users tap into the Internet by connecting a home computer to a server operated by a university, an employer or an access provider such as Prodigy or America Online. Two features that have made the Internet more accessible to personal computer users:
* World Wide Web: A linking system that allows users to call up color photographs and sophisticated graphics on-line by selecting on-screen images with a computer mouse. It was developed by programmers at several universities to make the Internet more accessible. Until recently, the software and hardware needed to use the Web was prohibitively expensive. But this year the largest on-line services are introducing programs that allow users to tap into the Web using standard telephone lines.
* Home page: An on-screen document that can include photographs and text. Using a computer mouse, the user clicks on words and images to call up additional information. There are thousands of home pages devoted to topics from “Star Trek” to municipal bus schedules to policy debates.
