Monday, August 21, 2000		Article

New media: the battle over a domain name
By Polly Sprenger

KATIE TARBOX, a young American writer, has been making headlines since May, when her autobiographical book, Katie.com, the story of her seduction by an online paedophile, was published in the US. Her publishers touted the book by as: "An onest, eye-opening account of a young woman who was bitterly betrayed by the information age."

But another Katie, this time a Londoner, is feeling bitterly betrayed by Penguin, the book’s US publishers. Katie Jones, 28, owns the Internet address Katie.com, which since May has been inundated with a flood of attention thanks to Tarbox’s book. The victim of an unfortunate case of electronic mistaken identity, she is also the proprietor of UKChat.com, one of the most popular independent chat sites in Britain, generating some 40,000 visitors a day.

The book describes in graphic detail how Tarbox met a 41-year-old serial sex offender in an Internet chat room, and later met up with him in a Texas hotel room, where he molested her. Penguin’s publicity machine won Tarbox a review of the "cautionary memoir" in People magazine. The New York Times called it "a testament to the wonders of the modern adolescent." CNN called Tarbox on to discuss the dangers of "cyber-predators." And America’s grande dame of morning talk show hosts, Katie Couric of NBC’s Today Show, advised parents and teenagers alike to use the book as a guide of what not to do on the Internet.

In the space of a single day, Jones’ personal web site had more than 1,00,000 visitors, and the south London Internet entrepreneur started to get e-mails from hundreds of Tarbox sympathisers, sharing their own experiences of molestation and rape. Jones, who managed chat services for MSN and AOL before leaving to start her own online chat company in 1998, is worried that the stigma of paedophilia and chat-room abuse addressed in the book will seep over from her personal site into her business activities."Lots of people know me as Katie Jones, online community person, and I’m known in this industry as the person who owns and runs UK Chat. Now the domain name is always going to be associated with this book," she says.

"It’s not mine any more, it’s theirs, and they didn’t even ask me if they could have it."

Single-name domains such as Katie.com or Bob.com are increasingly valuable as good, simple web addresses are becoming more difficult to get hold of. Bob.com was recently valued at more than $1m.

Katie.com used to house Jones’ personal CV, pictures of her young son, and a link to her professional site, UKChat.com. But with the release of the American book, with its ‘disturbing’ subject matter, Jones has closed the site indefinitely. "I started getting e-mails from people wondering if I was (the subject of the book)," she says. "The site was attracting the wrong kind of attention from the wrong kind of people."

— By arrangement with The Guardian