Forgive Jeff Woods if he’s feeling overwhelmed these days.
The president of Cary, NC, Internet service provider deltaComm Development says all he ever wanted was to offer his subscribers a reliable dial-up connection and e-mail addresses they could remember.
He thought he’d snagged a memorable domain name when he claimed “delta.com” five years ago. Woods didn’t know how right he was.
Delta.com had name recognition, no doubt about it. But it wasn’t necessarily the kind he wanted. Many visitors to the page assumed they’d landed at the Delta Air Lines Web site, and they bombarded deltaComm’s unwitting Web master with questions about fares and frequent flier miles.
“I’ve got more than 10,000 visitors a day who come to my site looking for Delta Air Lines,” says an exasperated Woods. “They’re using up a lot of bandwidth.” {Figures from Woods’ internal logs show, actually, that 5,000 visitors a day leave his site for the Delta Air Lines site.)
If Woods is looking for relief, he may get it this week from Ira Magaziner, the government’s pointman on a proposal to expand the number of top-level domain names.
But after years of back-and-forth with its corporate office in Atlanta, Woods knows where not to turn to for assistance: Delta Air Lines.
“We’re very sorry for Mr. Woods,” says Delta spokesman Kip Smith. “But we can’t help him.”
About three years ago, Woods told Delta Air Lines about his name troubles and offered to transfer delta.com to the airline for “more than $10,000 and less than $100,000,” he says.
He figured the price would cover the cost of converting deltaComm’s 600 subscribers to a new address. Smith says the initial asking price was actually “in the seven figures” but has steadily declined over time.
Would Delta Air Lines like to have the domain? “Sure,” he says. “But we’ve been working without it since 1995 and we feel it hasn’t been detrimental. We are using delta-air.com, and we have no plans to migrate the site to another domain.”
So Woods decided to give the airline an incentive. He posted the following notice on the delta.com title page: “If you’re looking for an airline, try American Airlines, the frequent-flier airline the owners and staff of deltaComm Internet Services flew 100,000 miles on in 1997.” Included is a link to the American Web page.
Woods underscores the jab with another note: “Please tell Delta’s Web master that you believe Delta ought to just pay us the actual cost of changing domain names, and to make delta.com the domain of Delta Air Lines. We’re quite willing to let them have it, but we must be compensated for the cost of moving everyone to another domain.”
Delta’s reply: “Woods can publish whatever he wants to on his site. He has his freedom of speech.”
I find it difficult to believe that Delta Air Lines would consciously send millions of visitors a year to rival American Airlines and then dismiss the decision as a First Amendment case study. Woods isn’t blameless. His asking price for delta.com is way too rich. The cost of transferring his users to a new domain can’t be as high as he claims.
Considering his link to American Airlines, it would be hard for the folks at Delta to interpret his actions as anything less than a form of cyberspace blackmail. In disputes such as these, the best solution is for domain name assigner Network Solutions to take the domain name back and keep it. Delta Air Lines obviously is patiently waiting for the asking price on the highly desirable domain to drop. DeltaComm, meanwhile, is taunting the big carrier as it tries to squeeze out money.
They’re both behaving like children, and someone should take their candy away from them.
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