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College upset over link to pornography Web site
By MAUREEN BYRNE AHERN SEMINOLE -- Juniata College is a 126-year-old institution in Huntingdon, Pa., with roots in the Church of the Brethren. Like most colleges, it has a Web site, www.juniata.edu, where prospective students and curious parents can learn about the school. So when an alumnus told Juniata officials last month that there was a Florida-based Web site with a similar address, www.juniata.com, they took a peek. Oh my. What they saw on their screen was a page advertising online hardcore pornography. "Our initial reaction was we were quite shocked," said David Gildea, associate vice president for marketing at the college, which has an enrollment of 1,300. There is nothing scholastic about the site, except for the banner advertising school girls. Those looking for information on the college won't find the day's lunch and dinner selections, a schedule of final exams or a virtual tour of the campus. Instead, a headline at the top of the page boasts "The Best Sex on the Net." Scroll down the screen and 44 banners advertise everything from orgies to naked celebrities. "I'm encouraging people not to go there," Gildea said. College administrators say they are confident that people surfing for the college's Web site will quickly realize they made a wrong turn. "If they stumble upon juniata.com, they're going to know right away they're not where they want to be," Gildea said. The pornography site is owned by Worldwide Media Inc., which has a Seminole post office address. Michael Berkens, president of the company, said he develops and sells Web sites from his Redington Shores home. The 43-year-old attorney said he had never heard of Juniata College and he picked the dot-com address for his porn site because he considered it a common first name for a woman. Juanita, maybe. But Juniata? Berkens has the right letters for the name, they just aren't in the right order. "There are so many variations of certain names," he said. After school officials discovered juniata.com, they quickly e-mailed the company asking to buy the address. For $5,000, it's yours, the company responded. The college has better ways to spend its money, Gildea said, so it never responded to Berkens' offer. Berkens said he didn't know a college wanted to buy the Web address. Gildea counters that the e-mail it sent to Worldwide Media had the college's letterhead on it. Juniata (pronounced ju-nee-AH-ta) is an American Indian word for "beautiful river." "It's a very common name here," Gildea said. "I don't get the whole deal," Berkens said. "If it was juniatacollege.com or juniatauniversity.com, I could understand. We didn't register it because there was a college by that name." Gildea said he doesn't know what Berkens' motives were when he named his site, but he mentioned another of Worldwide Media's Web sites: www.mostwanteddomains.com. The site lists thousands of Inernet addresses for sale from allergydiet.com for $1,000 to goodroads.com for $100,000. Gildea said he appreciates Berkens' business savvy. "You really have to applaud the guy's entrepreneurial spirit, but in the case of juniata.com, it gets problematic," he said. Berkens said now that he knows it's a college seeking the address, he would consider donating it to the college and taking a tax break for the loss. Hoarding Internet addresses and selling them to the highest bidder is called cybersquatting. And it's not going away any time soon. "There are a lot of issues with this, and one of the big ones is who governs what," said Lance Hoffman, a professor at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., who specializes in computers and their effect on society. "We're still developing this." Many institutions and companies buy rights to multiple permutations of their names to prevent cybersquatting incidents. But colleges aren't the only places with Internet address issues. The White House also has a problem of its own. Internet browsers who are searching for information on the White House and type www.whitehouse.com won't find a transcript of President Bush's recent State of the Union address or the latest news about the administration. What they will find is a page advertising "Hot Interns" and XXX videos. Yes, that's right, a porn site.
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