FTC vs. First Amendment
David Honig
honig at sprynet.com
Tue Oct 2 08:29:31 PDT 2001
So if someone goes to your site, the FTC can tell you how to
communicate? Or only if your site's DNS entry is hamming-close
to another? Or only if you're communicating unPC (e.g., erotica)
content?
And how does "bombarding them with ads" differ from spam, which
has been 1st-amend. protected so far?
If you run with javascript enabled, you deserve what you get.
Keep your laws off my HTML.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-7371736.html?tag=mn_hd
FTC shutters thousands of Web sites
By Reuters
October 1, 2001, 11:40 a.m. PT
WASHINGTON--A U.S. court shut down thousands of Web sites after it
determined that they diverted Web surfers and held them captive while
bombarding them with ads for pornography and gambling, the U.S.
government
said on Monday.
According to the Federal Trade Commission, John Zuccarini, of
Andalusia, Pa., outside
Philadelphia, operated more than 5,500 Web sites that diverted Web
surfers from their
intended destinations and exposed them to pop-up ads.
Zuccarini did not immediately respond to calls for comment.
Zuccarini registered many
misspellings of popular sites, such
as Cartoonnetwork.com, the
FTC said, in a bid to draw traffic
from sloppy typists. Visitors to
his sites often could not leave, as
the "back" button on their Web
browsers would be rigged to
trigger more pop-up ads.
"After one FTC staff member
closed out of 32 separate
windows, leaving just two
windows on the task bar, he
selected the 'back' button, only to
watch as the same seven windows that initiated the blitz erupted on
his screen, and the
cybertrap began anew," the FTC said in its complaint, filed in the
U.S. District Court for
the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia.
The scheme is especially harmful to children or employees who may put
their jobs at risk
when they inadvertently call up pornographic or gambling-related
material, the FTC said.
The district court has ordered Zuccarini to take his sites offline,
the FTC said, while the
case continues. But as of early Monday afternoon, at least one site
registered to Zuccarini,
Annakurnikova.com, was still functional.
Zuccarini had registered 41 variations on the name of pop star Britney
Spears, the FTC
said.
In its court action, the FTC is seeking to get Zuccarini to return the
estimated $800,000 to
$1 million he earns in advertising revenues.
According to the FTC, Zuccarini has been sued at least 63 times in the
last two years by
trademark owners, celebrities or others seeking to recover variants of
their Internet domain
names. He has lost 53 of those suits and been forced to return nearly
200 domain names,
the FTC said.
More information about the cypherpunks-legacy
mailing list