DomainTools Blog

Many Americans are rushing to mail in their tax returns since today is the US Tax deadline. Meanwhile, the House of Representatives is scheduled to vote on legislation that clarifies the law barring for-profit companies from using names that sound like official government agencies. They want to outlaw domain names in generic top level domains that have the same name as Government agencies.

The Internal Revenue Service commissioner, Mark W. Everson, has broadcast his concerns twice in the last three weeks about confusion over the official Web site of his agency and commercial firms playing off that confusion. Intersearch.com, the firm that owns the IRS.com Web site, says that it is fully complying with the current law and that it sees no reason to inform shareholders of the pending legislation, said Jennifer Faye Drimmer, its legal counsel.

However, we noticed that IRS.com has drastically changed its homepage after the pending legislation surfaced. Check out the two logos, one from today and other from a screenshot we took on March 18th. Sorry for the low resolution logo – we pulled it out of our Name Intelligence Thumbnail archive service.

The domain was purchased for $12.9 million on September 2005. Oops.

I bet Bush would sign the law – he wants WhiteHouse.com. But it would be wrong for the law to be created, since it would just bar the use of the domain be a for-profit company. The Government should purchase the domains at fare market value instead of targeting a company that bought the domains and broke no laws at the time. I think there is a law already on the books called imminent domain. If the Government wants your property, they just take it and give you money for it. We have never seen anything like this for domain names, but the Internet is young. If the federal goverment did this, could we soon see City Governments pulling out the same trick and trying to get Local City domains?

April 17th, 2007	March 18th, 2007