Pop-Up King Nabbed in Florida
The guy who figured out how to profit from a very common kind of human error -- the typo -- was arrested over the weekend at a beachfront Holiday Inn in Hollywood, Florida, after a three-year pursuit (sounds like Coen Brothers movie material). While working for a computer-parts store in Philly, it dawned on former art student John Zuccarini that:
...Internet surfers often make typographical errors. So he bought thousands of domain names with slight misspellings, such as jennferlopez.com, gorgewbush.com, or michealjordan.com. Zuccarini sat at his computer, sometimes 14 hours at a time, thinking up new names.
He spent about $112,000 every two years to register 1,600 domain names at $70 a pop, according to his arrest affidavit.
"It just became kind of an addiction, really," Zuccarini said in a court hearing in Philadelphia in March 2000. "You want to do it all the time... . It gets to be like fun, like a game."
At the height of his odd career, he was raking in between $800,000 and a million yearly, most of it from ad-clicks (at 10 to 15 cents per click). This fact surprises me -- I always figured the major profit potential came from blackmailing the corporations whose names were being misused.
Since his targets included children's sites such as teletubbies.com and cartoonnetwork.com, Zuccarini aroused the wrath not only of corporate America but, even more seriously, suburban America. He has the distinction of having pissed off a truly impressive array of people, including Nicole Kidman, Dave Matthews, the Disney Corporation and thousands of aggrieved parents.
To others, he's a libertarian hero. The case raises some interesting, difficult questions -- if you're opposed to RIAA bullying, as I am, aren't regulatory efforts such as the Truth in Domain Names Act similarly questionable? And where does that take us re: telemarketers? Americans tend to be inconsistent about free-speech issues; we like scoring tunes, but get outraged when confronted with lots of free, unwelcome junk.
I wouldn't call Zuccarini a "hero", but he did have a clever idea...
11:28:48 AM 
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