The Hill: Squatters sit on domain names for possible Palin presidential run

Somehow we don't see 'youbetcha2012.com' making the cut
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On Hillicon Valley, The Hill's technology blog, Sara Jerome reports on domain name speculators who are hopeful that Sarah Palin will run for president in two years, and her team will decide that that the domain they have registered is the one they absolutely must have for her official campaign website:

It doesn't matter that the next presidential election is a year away and the list of contenders is foggy at best. A healthy market has cropped up for Palin URLs in anticipation of her potential run.

The site names have been gobbled up by domain name squatters who want to profit on the resale or who want to use the real estate to politick on their own.

For potential candidate Palin, the speculation presents some risks.

She could wind up handing over a hefty sum to a hosting company if she gets intent about having the domain name of her choice, with the Web's most expensive URLs sometimes pricing into the millions.

But the larger threat may be political.

"The risk is that you don't want to have the egg on your face if someone else takes the URL and puts something on it you don't like," said Dave Grossman, a digital strategist at the firm Engage, which specializes in new media campaigns for conservative candidates.

For Palin, critics have already gone there. Sarahpalin2012.net, for instance, is home to a blog for "a few like-minded skeptics to voice our opinions on the [bleep] spewed daily by the talking heads in the media and by the public." The commentary on the site is critical of the Tea Party movement that Palin has associated herself with.

Our advice to some of these would-be speculators would be to hold off a bit on shopping for that exotic Italian sports car. Somehow we don't think that youbetcha2012.com or mamabear2012 are domain names for which a Palin campaign would fork over the big bucks. Although sarah2012.com and spalin2012.com appear to be much better bets, the odds that the domain name any speculator may be sitting on will turn a big profit are very long ones indeed.

- JP