Rick Brown, a preacher for ChristBridge Fellowship in Tomball, Texas, used me as the subject of a sermon printed in the local newspaper this week: When Pope John Paul died Rogers Cadenhead quickly registered www.BenedictXVI.com thinking this might be the name chosen by the new pope. When Cardinal Ratzinger was elected Pope he did choose the name Pope Benedict XVI, causing many to question what the Vatican would do to get the rights to that domain name. Cadenhead didn't ask the Vatican for money. Instead, in a ... read more

Political law attorney Matthew T. Sanderson believes the Internet needs a new .pol top-level domain because of cybersquatters who grab domain names related to politicians. He cites Meg Whitman's difficulty acquiring domains related to her gubernatorial run in California: Long before she began forming her campaign for governor of California, Meg Whitman got cybersquatted. Media speculation in early 2008 that the billionaire former chief executive of eBay would seek the state's highest office prompted a Santa ... read more

Google has begun integrating FeedBurner, the service for publishing, tracking and promoting RSS feeds, into the rest of the Don't Be Evil Empire. As part of the move, FeedBurner users who are employing the MyBrand feature must make a change to the name service for their domain names. MyBrand makes it possible to host your feeds on FeedBurner without losing any subscribers if you decide later to quit the service. I'm using it to host four feeds, including SportsFilter's RSS feed, on my own domains. MyBrand ... read more

On the June 1 Back to the Bible radio show, which airs on 1,200 religious stations around the world, host Woodrow Kroll told listeners how I could seek forgiveness from God: Jesus wants to take the burden of your guilt away. I read this little story. I just thought I had to pass it on to you. The question was asked, "How much would the Vatican pay for the pope's name?" Now that's not a theoretical question. A fellow by the name of Rogers Cadenhead, who is an admitted domain hoarder, bought the domain ... read more

I recently got the domain name watchingthewatchers.com in a drop when the previous owner let it expire. Since Watching the Watchers has been published at the same name in .org since 2004, we've been losing traffic from people who mistakenly tried the .com and ended up at a parked domain. To get the domain, I set up an account on GoDaddy and used its domain monitoring and back order service. You can monitor 100 domains for $5.99 and receive email when they're put on hold for non-payment or their status changes in ... read more

New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer appears to have begun legal proceedings to take the domain names eliotspitzer.com and eliotspitzer.org away from Eric Keller, a New Jersey online candy retailer who registered them in 2001. A Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) arbitration began today regarding the domains at the National Arbitration Forum. Arbitrators will decide whether the domains were registered and used in bad faith, whether Keller has legitimate rights in the names, and whether Spitzer has used ... read more

The National Arbitration Forum just released its decision in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. v. World Readable c/o R.L. Cadenhead, the domain-name dispute in which the film studio tried to take Wargames.Com away from me because it owns a trademark related to the 1983 film WarGames and the upcoming sequel WarGames 2: The Dead Code. A three-member panel of arbitrators denied MGM's claim on the grounds that I established my legitimate interest in selling wargames at the domain: The picture that emerges from this ... read more