Gone were the statistics on the economic performance of the developing world, the data on agriculture, food and fisheries, and the authoritative articles on corporate governance and sustainable development.
Instead, visitors who logged on to the site Dec. 17 were offered the "Greatest Sex Sites," a long list of mostly unprintable options including a "girlie zoo" and "hardcore teen photos." Faced with a steady stream of phone calls and e-mails from baffled visitors to the site, OECD officials scrambled to understand what had gone wrong.
They found that the registration of their French-language site, ocde.org, had lapsed because of a mixup over a $70 renewal check - and that a group called Domain for Sale had snapped up the name and was proposing to sell it back, a type of Internet extortion commonly called cybersquatting.
"They put up a porn site knowing that the pressure is on you to pay the money," said Sam Paltridge, the Internet specialist in the OECD's communications department who dealt with the case. "We certainly were not going to pay to get our name back."
The problem of cybersquatting is not new. Recent high profile victims include Hewlett-Packard, the U.S. computer company; ESPN, the U.S. sports network, and the Web site of Joe Montana, the former San Francisco 49ers football quarterback.
The fact that it happened to the OECD is particularly ironic because the organization promotes greater Internet usage around the world and is an authoritative source of global Internet data.
The OECD was lucky, in a way. Officials said the two-month cybersquatting would have been catastrophic had it happened to its English-language site, oecd.org, to which more than 90 percent of visitors to OECD sites connect.
The story of the OECD's brush with cybersquatting is both a cautionary tale for companies or organizations - as well as individuals - that have Web sites and a peek into the darker side of the Internet, where extortionists hide under the global network's cloak of anonymity.
The OECD eventually won its battle with the cybersquatter. The organization, which has 30 member countries including most of the developing world, reclaimed the site Feb. 11 after beginning preparations to sue the company that had registered ocde.org for Domain for Sale.
But the two-month ordeal was time-consuming and costly. David Small, the organization's director of legal affairs, said he had spent 150 hours on the problem, not counting the outside legal help the organization had hired.
The episode also, obviously, caused embarrassment for the OECD, eliciting e-mails from around Europe. Swiss government officials wrote in, as did a faculty member at the Catholic University of Mons in Belgium, who sent a note saying he had been "quite surprised" to log onto the site and find the pornographic material.
Any big company or organization is essentially at the mercy of its accounting department, which must ensure that the renewal process happens without a hitch. Once the name is in the hands of a cybersquatter, even the resources of an organization as large and influential as the OECD can be tested. Small said he never found out who was responsible for hijacking the site. The cybersquatter had posted false names, addresses and telephone numbers, he said.
When Small sent e-mails to the address listed in the registration form of Domain for Sale, he received replies from people using the names of dead American writers - Allen Ginsberg, Charles Bukowski and William Burroughs among them.
Domain For Sale listed 7 Vardanants Street, #32, Yerevan, Armenia, as its address. But when the OECD contacted the Armenian Ministry of Justice to verify the information, the ministry provided an affidavit saying that there was "no legal entity" by the name Domain for Sale at that address or anywhere else in Armenia.
The address belonged to an Armenian couple and their 6-year old daughter.
Because providing false information is grounds for losing one's registration according to the rules that govern the global network, Small contacted the company that had registered the site for Domain for Sale, a Canadian company called Namescout.
Namescout replied through its law firm that there was no evidence that false information had been "willfully" provided.
Small also contacted the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, the U.S. government-sponsored organization charged with overseeing the distribution of Internet names, but was told to deal directly with the registrar.
"There's nobody interpreting and enforcing the rules properly," Small said of the Internet. "It's threatening the integrity of the system." Ten percent to 15 percent of all registration information in the official "whois" files on the Internet is inaccurate - the equivalent of one out of every 10 phone numbers in a telephone book being wrong - according to the Australian Taxation Office, which conducts quarterly surveys on e-commerce sites. It is impossible to know how much of this false information has been deliberately given.
Mary Hewitt, director of communications at ICANN, said her organization "steps in" from time to time if basic rules of registration are not followed, but she said it was not ICANN's job to "enforce" the rules of the Internet. Hewitt said she regularly received calls from smaller organizations whose registrations had lapsed, including one from a Baptist women's group in Tennessee.
"They let the name expire, and when somebody went to check a meeting time, it came up as a porn site. They said, 'What can we do?'" Hewitt said.
Victims of cybersquatting can take their case to a panel of arbitrators at ICANN; they can sue the cybersquatter in the U.S. court system, or they can take their lumps and negotiate payment with the cybersquatter.
Hewitt said the best solution was to not let the name lapse in the first place.
"If I own a gas station across the street, and I let the lease go and an adult sex-toy shop opens, I can't do anything about that," she said.
Yet the issue of a Web site registration lapsing is perhaps not as clear-cut as a real-estate lease.
Many victims of cybersquatters argue that they have never received notification of expiration from their registrar. The notices are almost always sent out by e-mail and might be confused with junk mail, Hewitt said.
Once a name has been thrown back into the pool of available addresses, it can be snapped up within hours.
Cybersquatters often use the resources of a Canadian company, SnapNames.com, that constantly scours the Internet for names that fail to get renewed.
When an address is thrown back into the pool of available names, SnapNames informs clients who have expressed an interest.
In the case of the OECD, the address ocde.org was canceled after the $70 renewal check was sent without the reference number written on the back. The Internet registrar, Verisign, cashed the check but said it did not know what account to credit. (Small finds this argument weak: "How many OECDs are there?" he asked.) Verisign said it had sent an e-mail warning about the renewal, but Small said the organization had no record of receiving it.
To make it more difficult for cybersquatters to operate, ICANN's board of directors has proposed a 30-day grace period between the time a registration expires and the time it gets thrown back into the pool of available names. The proposal is to be decided on later in the year.
Paltridge, the OECD Internet specialist, said cybersquatting was likely to continue because the squatters register so many names that they provide steady revenue for registrars.
"The biggest customers are cybersquatters," he said. "Registrars don't really want to lose them to another registrar. They have an economic incentive to protect the wrongdoer."
Copyright © 2001 The International Herald Tribune