BenedictXVI.com Owner Donates Address to N.Y. Charity
By David McGuire
washingtonpost.com Staff Writer
Thursday, April 28, 2005; 4:21 PM
The Florida man who registered BenedictXVI.com weeks before Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger became the Catholic Church's new pope has donated the Internet address to a New York charity, at least until the Vatican comes calling.
Rogers Cadenhead, a 38-year-old technical book author, bought BenedictXVI.com at the beginning of April after doing some research into papal naming conventions. When the new pope's name was announced, he said traffic to his Web site spiked to more than 1,000 hits a minute, media outlets flooded his voicemail with interview requests, and Catholics deluged his e-mail inbox with requests that he not tarnish the new pope's online identity.
Post, April 20
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Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger of Germany is not the only person to value the papal moniker Benedict XVI.
Cadenhead said he didn't register the domain with money in mind, and vowed he wouldn't do anything with the address that would offend his Catholic grandmother. "I was more excited [at] the prospect of being right about the name than getting the domain. I was like, 'Woo hoo!' And then I said, 'Oh no, what have I done to my server?'"
After mulling his options, Cadenhead decided to give the domain to New York-based Modest Needs, an online charity that helps low-income families cover unplanned expenses. Cadenhead said he signed the domain over to the charity's founder, Keith Taylor, with the understanding that the group would transfer it to the Vatican if officials from the Holy See ever asked for the address.
Bill Ryan, a spokesman for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in Washington, declined to comment for this story. The Vatican Embassy in Washington directed all calls to the main Vatican media office, which was not immediately available for comment. The Vatican already maintains a rich Web site within .va, its own top-level Internet domain.
Visitors to BenedictXVI.com are greeted with a page explaining the mission of Modest Needs, along with a link to the official Vatican Web site for any users who may actually be looking for the official church site. Taylor said hits to his Web site have more than quintupled and donations have more than doubled since linking the site to BenedictXVI.com.
"This thing was moving so fast that if I went to another charity I admire -- say, the Red Cross -- by the time they were ready to do something, the traffic would have been gone," Cadenhead said.
Owners of other domains playing off of the new pope's name aren't feeling so charitable. A man identifying himself as Jacopo di Trani, of Florence, Italy, has put up a Web site at Benedict16.com, offering to sell it to the highest bidder. Asked by e-mail if he'd feel any qualms selling the domain to a gambling site, di Trani wrote: "Absolutely NO. It's just the right thing to do. Life eats life and nothing is sacred, man."
Di Trani said he's received offers of up to 10,000 euros (about $12,900) for the domain. He said he plans to put the address up for sale in an eBay auction. A member here?
Another speculator, contacted through public Internet records, identified himself as Chris Dunaway, a 33-year-old prep cook in Gatlinburg, Tenn. He registered PopeBenedict16.com, PopeBenedict.net, PopeBenedict.org, PopeBenedict.info, PopeBenedictXVI.net and PopeBenedictXVI.info, offering all six domains on eBay for a starting bid of $6,999. So far he's had no takers.
To test the market Dunaway also put the domains up for sale individually on the auction site Sedo.com, which specializes in selling Internet addresses. Jay Finnan, Sedo.com's director of customer relations, said Dunaway has received bids for two of the domains totaling $2,100.
Dunaway said doesn't want to sell the domains to a pornography or gambling site. But he said he won't stand in the way of another entrepreneur buying the domains in order to resell them, regardless of where they eventually end up.
"Domains are domains. It's a business," he said.
For nearly as long as Internet addresses have been sold commercially, speculators, sometimes called "cyber-squatters," have bought up addresses named after famous people or successful companies. Cyber-squatters usually either sell the addresses to the highest bidder or use them to boost traffic to their own Web sites.
A 1999 law made it illegal to buy a domain linked to a famous person or trademarked name with the intention of extorting money out of a trademark holder. But that law does not prevent speculators from buying or selling addresses linked to famous names.
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