Surprise Donation to Gore and Lieberman: a New Web Address
Al Gore and Joe Lieberman now have a Web site for their presidential campaign, and thanks to a generous 20-year-old college student, they didn’t have to pay for it.
David Jackson, who, like Lieberman, is an Orthodox Jew, had registered https://www.gorelieberman.com, hoping Gore would select the Connecticut senator as his running mate. When word spread that Lieberman would join the ticket, Jackson e-mailed the campaign offering to give away the address free.
Other “domain name investors,” commonly called “cyber-squatters,” had demanded as much as $200,000 a month for addresses featuring both candidates’ names, Gore Internet director Ben Green said.
Jackson’s gift of the online address is “just an incredible stroke of luck,” Green said, noting that Federal Election Commission regulations required the campaign to reimburse the University of Maryland junior the $100 he paid to register the address.
“This is the best domain name that has a combination of these men’s names, and it is the one we wanted,” Green said. “We were just very, very lucky that the individual who owned it was not a materialistic person but just a very nice kid.”
Before Lieberman joined Gore, the Gore campaign had already established https://www.algore2000.com as its official site.
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