Bad things happen to former government owned domain names.
I just finished reading a story form The Ottawa Citizen about how Canada’s 100th anniversary of flight web site expired and (at least briefly) showed ads for escorts.
For the Canadian government it got the worst possible outcome. The domain name wasn’t just a parked domain; someone actively tried to take advantage of its prior use. The new owner apparently left a notice on the page:
“To previous domain owner: We bought this domain after expiration so it’s not our fault that you lost it. We put old content for this domain only to avoid losing good quality of it from SEO point of view. If it’s a problem for you contact us ASAP!â€
The page now resolves to a simple parked page. But either way it’s embarrassing for the government with all of those links from respectable sites linking to the expired domain.
I came across a similar situation a couple months ago. The City of Austin let a domain name expire but still had time to redeem it. It had promoted this domain in print and web communications. When I notified the city’s tech department about the situation, the response was “oh yeah, we’re rebranding to a new domain name.”
That’s great, but for $10 a year you may as well renew and forward the old one.
Old news says
This is old news
The name expired a year ago
The fact that the abuse of the former owners code went on for a year without comment from either the government or the press speaks to how uniformed some still are on the subject of domains
The new owner has used the same verbiage on a number of domains he has picked up on the drops but even more intelligently he adds subPages to the old site and markets fleshlights and sex toys on the new links
The perpetrator will soon be unmasked