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The seamy worlds of Hustler and Playboy collided recently, when Tonya Flynt, the daughter of Hustler publisher Larry Flynt, registered the domain name PlayboyOnline.com. Would-be Playboy.com visitors who mistakenly logged onto PlayboyOnline.com instead found themselves on a page featuring nothing but a few banner ads. But it wasn’t an effort to poach surfers: When it comes to father-daughter relations, Tonya Flynt is nothing like Christie Hefner, CEO of Playboy Enterprises and the daughter of Playboy founder Hugh Hefner. Flynt is estranged from her father and is an active anti-porn crusader. One of Flynt’s strategies is directing people to the web site of her anti-porn foundation. Understandably, Playboy felt that Flynt was cybersquatting, and the World Intellectual Property Organization agreed. Because there is no doubt that Flynt is aware of the meaning of the Playboy trademark and because Flynt was making some money from the banner ads, the WIPO ordered the domain name transferred to Playboy Enterprises.
It’s official: InfoSpace gets Excite’s assets
The acquisition of some assets from search site and portal Excite.com by InfoSpace has been approved. The deal includes trademarks, domain names and user traffic but not Excite@Home's physical assets. InfoSpace, which syndicates internet and wireless content, in addition to providing search services, will in turn sell or license part of its newly-acquired Excite.com holdings to another leading portal, iWon, which specializes in sweepstakes as a traffic-boosting gimmick. InfoSpace will control Excite’s search and directory services. It paid an estimated $10 million for Excite.com's assets.
Take that, @Home: Cox builds high-speed network
Cox Communications is laying the tracks for a high-speed internet network of its own, an effort that’s meant to reduce its reliance on the network of troubled Excite@Home. The new Cox network will cost an estimated $150 million. A replacement for Excite@Home is necessary because it recently filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and is having problems providing service. Roughly 550,000 of Cox’s customers use Excite@Home, but they will be shifted to Cox’s own network at some point next year. But that might not be soon enough, because it is possible that @Home's internet access service will be shut down as soon as the end of this week. The broadband-access side of the company is expected to be purchased by AT&T, but the sale is contingent upon creditor approval.
Alloy buys college/high-school marketer 360Youth
Alloy, the teen portal that doubles as an online and off-line direct marketer to teens, has acquired 360 Youth, a company that markets to high school and college students. The deal is valued at $43 million. The purchase gives Alloy access to 360 Youth’s numerous advertising marketing deals on college and high school campuses all over the country. These include the “Campus Source” and “High School Source” backlit boards that are seen by some 11 million students, and campus events and consumer product samplers for students. Alloy was founded in 1996; 360 Youth has been around for 26 years. Although Alloy has dropped the “Online” from its name, it has been notable for being a profitable dot.com.
Nothing stays dead on the web
Since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, federal agencies have been scrambling to reconsider and sometimes delete sensitive online information regarding nuclear or biological weapons. But the data rarely disappears for good. The federal agency Toxic Substances and Disease Registry quickly pulled a potentially dangerous report from its web site after the Sept. 11 attacks. Entitled "Industrial Chemicals and Terrorism," the document listed sources for homemade nerve gases and improvised explosives. But the report currently lives on in several locations on the web, including the site for the Oklahoma City National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism, a personal web site for a UC Santa Cruz graduate student, and the Internet Archive, a running history of the web that regularly indexes the internet through a webcrawler. The Archive allows for retroactive removal, but site owners hope this option is not overused, as the historical accuracy of the project will be compromised. Site purveyors can also use insert a few lines of code into the HTML, a process known as "robot exclusion," which lets search bots know they should move along.
November 29, 2001 © 2001 Media Life
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