I was watching Conan O’Brien tonight for the first time in awhile, and he mentioned that on a previous show, he’d made a joke involving the website “HornyManatee dot com.” Well, apparently, according to the NBC standards and practices lawyers, whenever a website is mentioned on TV, the domain name must exist, otherwise it has to be bought by someone involved in the mentioning. Consequently, NBC became the owners of “HornyManatee dot com” sometime in the intervening period. At first, I thought it was just an NBC policy, but he implied strongly that it was actually a law, presumably an FCC regulation.
Now, I’m not one of them fancy lawyers or anything, but this sounds a bit fishy to me. Is it true that anytime someone mentions a domain name on TV, it has to exist?
What if I was an audience in a live TV show and I happened to shout out “rowdy-howdy dot com!” so that it was audible and got broadcast. Would I then have to shell out whatever money to buy up the domain? Or would the broadcasters be responsible? Or is it all just a loud of hooey designed to get people to visit their website?
Just a complete WAG here, but I’m guessing that if the site exists, they could contact the owner and clear its use beforehand. But if it doesn’t exist and if NBC (or whoever) didn’t buy it up, then someone else could rush out and register it, then complain and whine and sue and whatnot when “their” site was named on TV.
It’s not really that different to using fictitious 555 telephone numbers, is it? Keeps the pranksters at bay, etc. The difference being it’s not possible to have a ficitious but genuine-sounding .com URL. And registering a domain name is hardly going to break the bank for a broadcaster.
I’m going out on a limb as say there is no such law. There wouldn’t be any rational reason for it, as far as I can tell. Conan is, after all, a comedian and is well-known for making up just this sort of silly story to set up a joke or three.
It’s certainly not a law or regulation, but it’s possible that NBC has such a S&P policy. If there is, it’s probably just to prevent people from hearing a fictitious domain on TV, registering it, and putting up a web page that says “NBC sucks bawlz!!!11 omfg!!!$$21!”
I have a few small websites and this is the issue.
Most smaller websites don’t have their own servers. They run thru a provider like GoDaddy or 1and1. Depending on the package you choose you get so much bandwidth a month. Like my site is 1,000GB per month. Now if I go over that I get charged A LOT. It would be MUCH cheaper to upgrade to the next package. Kind of like cell phone packages.
Now if someone on a TV show mentions my site, I could get a LOT more people looking and my bandwidth transfer will go thru the roof and I’ll owe a great deal of money.
This is why TV shows do not want mention domains unless they own them. It is cheap to own a domain. You can get a .com for 5.99 a year. You can get a .info for 1.99 a year.
So it makes sense to simply register them and not do anything with them. OR you could even set up a quick site with nonsense and google ad words. Thus if Conan mentions a site, NBC could register put up one page with some google ad words an if enough people click, you’ve paid back your $5.99 and even more so in one day.
NBC didn’t just register the domain - they created a web site with “manatee” pictures and video. I see two possibilities: either the Standards and Practices rule doesn’t exist at all, or it does exist and Conan is making fun of it. The former seems more likely to me - despite what friedo says, it seems likely more likely to me that Standards and Practices would have rules restricting mention of existing web sites, rather than ones that don’t exist. Who knows, though - corporate bureaucracies have some up with silly rules before.
BTW, I don’t think Muriel’s explanation covers this situation. The NBC rule is supposedly against mentioning web sites that don’t exist. How could a non-existent web site be overwhelmed with hits?
How does a website owner protect themselves against being overwhelmed with hits and therefore owing a lot of money? You never know when your site is going to be mentioned on slashdot or something that is going to do that.
They must have a ‘cap’ they can specify where the site will be taken down after a certain number of hits rather than leaving themselves open to a huge bandwidth charge.
I worked for a very large domain registrar for six years and never heard of anything like this, and I heard of some weird shit. That doesn’t prove that there is no such law, but I doubt it and agree with Q.E.D.'s well-reasoned conclusion.
It can work in amusing fashion. Recently the UK Sun tabloid heralded the creation of an online paedophile register with the typically restrained frontpage splash “PERVHUNT.COM”. Of course, they did not actually own the domain, which was quickly snapped up by a regular on the media whore/gossip site Popbitch, who redirected the large amount of traffic to the Sun’s own Page 3 Rookies page (which has topless photos of barely legal teens). Here is a bit about it, but the pervhunt domain now points to something a bit more sensible.
