Today is the fourth class of our current September class period. We will start class with a casual conversation. Our material today is about cybersquatting.
Four years ago, a trademark lawyer in Brooklyn bought a bunch of domain names for hypothetical presidential tickets, including harriswalz.com. His gamble paid off this week. NPR's Rachel Treisman reports.
RACHEL TREISMAN, BYLINE: Jeremy Green Eche calls himself a domain investor. Other people might call him a cybersquatter.
JEREMY GREEN ECHE: It's a pejorative term, but I don't mind using it because it's still accurate.
TREISMAN: The 36-year-old registers websites for hypothetical presidential tickets, buying the domain names at about $10 each and renewing them every year. In August 2020, he snapped up 15 different websites for a potential Kamala Harris candidacy.
ECHE: I knew Harris was probably going to run again after 2020, so I just bought every combination of her name with a heartland governor or heartland senator I could think of.
TREISMAN: The list included Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman and, of course, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, who the vice president picked as her running mate this week.
ECHE: It's really fun to register a domain and then have this kind of payoff where I just hit the jackpot, and I get a little news cycle. It's just kind of a good time for me.
TREISMAN: This isn't the first time Eche has hit the jackpot. He was the owner of clintonkaine.com in 2016, when Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton chose Virginia Senator Tim Kaine as her running mate. Here's Eche on MORNING EDITION that year.
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ECHE: By the time this choice came around, I was living on credit card debt. So this was a huge break for me, actually.
TREISMAN: Eche wanted to sell the domain for at least $10,000 - ideally to the Clinton campaign - but he said they offered him less than half of that. He ultimately sold it for $15,000 to a buyer who turned out to be the Trump campaign. They used the site to publish anti-Clinton news during the election. Eche hoped things would play out differently this time around.
ECHE: I'm hoping the Harris campaign just buys it from me for 15,000. Adjusting for inflation, this is a pretty good deal.
TREISMAN: The campaign didn't respond to NPR's request for comment. But within hours of the Walz announcement, someone else purchased the site at asking price. Eche said the buyer is a Harris supporter who didn't want the domain to fall into the wrong hands. At the end of the day, it's another win for Eche.
ECHE: I feel like the GOAT, you know, of this very, very small niche of cybersquatting.
TREISMAN: Eche is already thinking about future election cycles. He has a good feeling about Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer and is holding on to 10 of her domain names, just in case.