Oversee Missing Out on Weinergate

If you follow politics (or the news in general), you’ve probably heard about the crotch photo that appeared on New York Congessman Anthony Weiner’s Twitter account. Dubbed “Weinergate,” this news story seems to have legs and will likely continue to stay in the news for at least the next few days.

I was curious about whether someone had jumped on the bandwagon and registered Weinergate.com. Not surprisingly, the domain name was registered, but it wasn’t a recent registration. The domain name was created in May of 2010, and it’s been owned by “Oversee Domain Management, LLC,” which I believe is an entity of Oversee.net.

The domain name appears to have expired a year after it was created, and surprisingly on June 3, while Weinergate was all over the news, the domain name changed ownership to “NameKing Expired Domain.” It’s likely that this is the status of names that aren’t renewed by the company.

At the present time, the domain name doesn’t even resolve.

Elliot Silver
Elliot Silver
About The Author: Elliot Silver is an Internet entrepreneur and publisher of DomainInvesting.com. Elliot is also the founder and President of Top Notch Domains, LLC, a company that has closed eight figures in deals. Please read the DomainInvesting.com Terms of Use page for additional information about the publisher, website comment policy, disclosures, and conflicts of interest. Reach out to Elliot: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn

21 COMMENTS

  1. @ Elliot, Hear me out. Think about it. Wiener is spelled, “i-e-r,” not, “eir.” Did someone conjure up Weinergate a year ago? I don’t think so. It was registered, 06-27. the same night as the tweet, and Verisign pushed back the date one year. Thank you.

  2. @ Louise,

    You’re joking, right? I’ve seen you posting for a long time, so you can’t be some newb off the street that just fell of the turnip truck

    That being said, your idea makes no sense at all. Do you know how DomainTools archives their database entries?

    Assuming you don’t, your conspiracy theory still holds no water, unless Oversee, Verisign, and Thought Convergence (three completely different companies – one of them being public) are in on it, for a domain name that’s worth very little and has a very short shelf life.

    All that being said, you’d need to solve how this database entry was archived more than one year prior:

    http://www.domaintools.com/research/whois-history/?page=details&domain=weinergate.com&date=2010-05-27

    You’d also have to ask yourself if they went to ALL that trouble, why they aren’t even doing anything with the name.

    I really hope you’re kidding and my sense of humor isn’t picking up on it because it makes no sense why or how it would be done.

  3. @ Elliot, I DID fall off the turnip truck, and sometimes I am way off and have to retract and stand corrected.

    Verisign offers a service called, ConsoliDate. It’s promotional says:

    “ConsoliDate lets your customers coordinate renewals on a selected date to better manage large domain name portfolios.”

    It is easy and slick to manipulate the dates for renewal. How about backdating a new registration, to give it an advantage in UDPR against a trademark, or simply increase its value?

    Elsewhere on your blog, on another thread – the dot tv thread? Or new registrations? – I already posted and went on and on how 3DSConsole was absolutely for the taking in every extension on or before January 14th. Thanx for letting me document this. Seven extensions registered by six different entities in five or six different countries ON ONE SINGLE DAY? Notwithstanding an announcement made by Nintendo that day? No. They were all registered AFTER January 14th or 18th – I forget which – and backdated.

    I already wrote the President with copies to the NTIA, ICANN, the Justice Department, the IRS, and I’m tired of being the only one, but I do believe it, and I do mail missives once a year or so. It’s time and expense to compose the thing, document it, make copies and send to everybody. Someone has to do it.

  4. “How about backdating a new registration, to give it an advantage in UDPR against a trademark, or simply increase its value?”

    @ Louise

    No idea if that’s possible, but even if it was, the Whois Historical Record is maintained by a third, completely different company. Not only would it be senseless to do in this particular case, but it would take a coordinated effort on the part of three totally separate and unrelated companies.

    Regarding the other thing… What’s to say you didn’t mistype it or perhaps there was a data retrieval error. Either that, or again, three unrelated companies coordinating efforts for names that are hardly worth anything. Again, makes no sense.

    In any case, I think it’s pretty apparent that this isn’t a conspiracy and that the information is legit, especially since it’s not a TM and they aren’t even using it.

  5. NameKing turned out to be the brokering front end for an Oversee/Moniker domain I was after.
    In my case, Oversee had registered a typo of a non-profit I was working with.
    Eventually I concluded that part of Oversee’s automated domain registration process included registering typos of popular or trending search terms (I could be wrong but that was my conclusion. PS Oversee eventually gave us the name, no charge).
    And it seems there was a previous Wiener Gate! A famous ballerina was fired for posing topless in an Austrian men’s magazine called Wiener. Most of the press I found centered around October 2010, which doesn’t match the May 2010 registration you mention.
    I had a hunch there had been some kind of Wiener Gate – related press/search flare-up and that Oversee’s automated domain registration software had picked it up.
    I know this sounds a little far-fetched, but if you run into similar mysteries, try the ‘automated domain registration’ hypothesis on for size.

  6. Guess your post and our conversation was noticed, @ Elliot!

    Check the WhosIs now!

    Creation Date: 31-jul-2011

    Please, would you PLEASE just acknowledge that it might be so, and that I might be right, that insiders are finagling the creation dates on new registrations? Which means they’re messing with the zone files.

  7. @ Elliot said:

    “it would take a coordinated effort on the part of three totally separate and unrelated companies.”

    That why they call it, “Organized Crime.”

    Thank you!

  8. Hey Louise. You emailed the President ? Hopefully it was the president of your local AA because you need to stop sipping the sauce at work. The domain expired and another registrar picked it up, thus the new creation date. Nobody is messing with the whois . Please remove the tinfoil hat and lay off the sauce.

  9. It seems the domain name expired and dropped one year after it was registered (in May). After it went through the redemption period another company bought it, hence the July creation date. This happens all the time and I don’t understand why you refuse to believe it. Maybe you should do some more research on the domain lifecycle instead of trying to make this seem like some sort of “organized crime” conspiracy.

  10. It’s okay, @ Elliot. You don’t have to respond. This is a practice I have been noticing. Usually, if I don’t register a domain name, I don’t take a screen shot to show its availability for future reference. But I started doing that on some searches.

    Hopefully I’ll have more concrete evidence soon.

    Plus, I appreciate what you are trying to do, @ Elliot, explain the lifecycle of a domain name to me.

  11. @ Louise

    i think you’ll believe whatever it is that you want to believe.

    If this domain name was of such significant value to have three different organizations involved in a conspiracy, I don’t think they would have dropped it. I also don’t think the creation date would matter.

    In any case, have a good weekend.

  12. It’s a new form of “domain tasting.” Insiders at the registry level register a domain, backdate the registration a year, see if it sells, then allow it to, “expire” if it doesn’t sell. That’s what it is made to appear from a cursory review of the WhosIs to outsiders.

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