Whitehouse.com

Last updated
Whitehouse.com
Type of site
 Adult, news
Available inEnglish
OwnerDan Parisi
URL www.whitehouse.com
CommercialYes
LaunchedMay 21, 1997;26 years ago (1997-05-21) [1]
Current statusActive

whitehouse.com is a political entertainment website that first came online in May 1996. [2] According to a statement on the web, it was originally created by Ransom Scott as a known place where uncensored discussion of government policies could occur before adult content was added to make it more profitable. [3] In June 2022, adult content was added back to the website. [4]

Contents

Controversy

The site's hosting of adult content paralleled the dot-com bubble, when Internet development focused on the promotion of websites with .com domains. A person seeking information about the White House, the American landmark residence/place-of-work, might expect to find such a thing at a .com address. The possibility of a minor making this mistake was especially noted. [3] Because of the explicit and commercial content of the site, it was frequently cited as one of the most egregious examples of domain name misuse, up until the domain was sold.

The website whitehouse.org, a humor site that formerly satirized the former U.S. president George W. Bush, remains controversial for similar reasons, although less so because its content is usually much less explicit.

In 2006, PC World ranked Whitehouse.com #13 on its list of "The 25 Worst Web Sites". [5]

Opposition

In December 1997, a cease and desist letter arrived from the White House, stating: "…we do not challenge your right to pursue it or to exercise your First Amendment rights, but we do challenge your right to use the White House, the President, and the First Lady as a marketing device. For adult internet users, that device is, at the least, part of a deceptive scheme. For younger Internet users, it has more disturbing consequences." [6] The letter had no effect and the site stayed up.

Statuses and uses

In 2004, Dan Parisi decided to sell the domain, primarily because his son would be going into kindergarten the next year. The sale did not occur. [7] As of 2003, Parisi was making US$1 million annually from the site alone. [8] Parisi had said he did not want to sell the domain name to anyone in the adult entertainment industry, and even claimed to have turned down what was essentially a blank check from a buyer hiding his identity behind his broker.

In November 2005, the domain appeared to be used for a real estate site. In December 2005 it contained only Google ads, with a notice that a site for investigating people by checking their public records would be coming. In March 2006, whitehouse.com called itself "America's Free Speech Forum". It advertised a cartoon contest and presented links to Associated Press political news stories. In July 2006, the site was a real estate site again, and forwarded to www.house.com. As of November 2006, the site was a search engine for people, which searched over 90 million White Pages listings and 14 million Yellow Pages listings. As of June–October 2007, the site had once again changed and now claimed to be "your source for up-to-date information to help you keep track of the major party candidates for President."

Until early 2009, the domain redirected to the previous real estate website again. The site was being used for home loan modification and debt consolidation, with the disclaimer reading that is not "affiliated or endorsed by the U.S. Government". As of September 2009, the site was a local New Jersey-centered video hosting site. The site's main purpose was to host videos of local town hall meetings in New Jersey.

As of July 2010, the site was a blank page with large black letters stating, "Future site of WhiteHouse.com" with no other information or link. As of Sept 2010, the site returned with the Banner Heading of WhiteHouseLawyers.com. The site's purported main purpose was to provide a search portal for personal injury / disability lawyers based on users location. But upon testing user input including name, phone, state, and e-mail, no listing of lawyers was provided. Later that month the site advertised financial aid opportunities. As of June 2011, the site again redirected to www.house.com.

As of October 2015, the domain was parked, displayed a picture of the White House and text advertisement 'search results' relating to the White House, Washington D.C. or adult services. As of June 2016, the site displayed a blank page with black letters stating, "WhiteHouse.com Official Site". The subtext read, "Celebrating our 19th Anniversary (1997-2016)" and "World's Most Famous Adult Site coming back Summer 2016".

As of April 2017, the site was once again parked, with similar content as in its October 2015 version. As of August 2017, the site was being used to protest the Trump administration in the wake of the Unite the Right rally. As of November 2017, the site was again a parked domain. By January 2018, the site contained a collection of brief political news stories with the slogan "Where Hate does not Live!". The website claims to be owned and operated by WhiteHouse Network LLC. WHOIS data suggests the domain is administrated by Dan Parisi.

As of May 2020, the site was offering information about the COVID-19 pandemic, plus an opinion poll on the Trump administration's handling of the COVID-19 crisis in the United States. It still listed "WhiteHouse Network LLC" as its owner. A misspelled disclaimer at the footer of the site claims "WhiteHouse Beta is not affiliated or endorsed by U.S. Government"[sic]. As of January 2020, the site offers betting for senate and house election results.

In 2022, the website relaunched as a "Adult & Free Speech Site" with adult content once again. [9] In 2023 it shows polls and urges visitors to bet on certain topics, however there is no adult content on the website as of the 24th of June, 2023.

Legacy

This type of behavior with trademarks led the United States government to the passage of the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act. The ACPA, however, protects only the registration of trademarks as domain names and would not help the U.S. government with the registration of the names of its offices or agencies.

See also

Related Research Articles

An Internet filter is software that restricts or controls the content an Internet user is capable to access, especially when utilized to restrict material delivered over the Internet via the Web, Email, or other means. Content-control software determines what content will be available or be blocked.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">MP3.com</span> Music news website

MP3.com was a web site operated by Paramount Global publishing tabloid-style news items about digital music and artists, songs, services, and technologies. It is better known for its original incarnation as a legal, free music-sharing service, named after the popular music file format MP3, popular with independent musicians for promoting their work. That service was shut down on December 2, 2003, by CNET, which, after purchasing the domain name, established the current MP3.com site.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Network Solutions</span> American-based technology company

Network Solutions, LLC, formerly Web.com is an American-based technology company and a subsidiary of Web.com, the 4th largest .com domain name registrar with over 6.7 million registrations as of August 2018. In addition to being a domain name registrar, Network Solutions provides web services such as web hosting, website design and online marketing, including search engine optimization and pay per click management.

CNET Download is an Internet download directory website launched in 1996 as a part of CNET. Initially it resided on the domain download.com, and then download.com.com for a while, and is now download.cnet.com. The domain download.com attracted at least 113 million visitors annually by 2008 according to a Compete.com study.

WHITEHOUSE.ORG is a parody website, first registered in 1995, that has satirized the president of the United States intermittently since 1996. It is currently entitled TRUMP® WHITE HOUSE, and is published by Americatastic, Inc.

TV.com was a website owned by Red Ventures that covered television series and episodes with a focus on English-language shows made or broadcast in Australia, Canada, Ireland, Japan, New Zealand, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Originally launched by CNET in the mid-1990s, the website was transformed in 2005 when CNET acquired the website TV Tome and incorporated its assets into the new website's composition. CNET Networks, including the TV.com site, was later purchased by CBS in 2008. In its heyday, TV.com emphasized user-generated content listings for a wide variety of programs that included episode air dates, descriptions, news, season listings, notes, credits, trivia, and a forum section.

SafeSearch is a feature in Google Search and Google Images that acts as an automated filter of pornography and potentially offensive and inappropriate content.

Hell.com is an internet domain which has achieved a degree of notoriety due to its name, and an intentionally mysterious website that existed there from August 1995 to 2009 created by the first registrant of the domain, artist Kenneth Aronson. The domain was sold by Aronson in 2009.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bing Videos</span> Microsofts Video Search via Bing

Bing Videos is a video search service and part of Microsoft's Bing search engine. The service enables users to search and view videos across various websites. Bing Videos was officially released on September 26, 2007 as Live Search Video, and rebranded as Bing Videos on June 1, 2009.

Experience Project was a free social networking website consisting of various online communities. It operated from 2007 until 2016, when it announced it would suspend registrations and enter a read-only mode for an indefinite period.

RedTube is a pornographic video-sharing site, which in September 2009 held an Alexa ranking within the world's top 100 sites. It is one of several pornographic websites owned by Aylo. In June 2010 it had fallen out of the top 100, but it made a return in mid-2012. As of mid September 2020 its Alexa ranking was 520. Its popularity has been ascribed to its non-sexual name, which is a reference to the non-pornographic video sharing website YouTube. The website is based in Houston, Texas, and has servers in San Francisco, New Orleans and Montreal.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Torrentz</span> BitTorrent metasearch engine

Torrentz was a Finland-based metasearch engine for BitTorrent, run by an individual known as Flippy and founded on 24 July 2003. It indexed torrents from various major torrent websites and offered compilations of various trackers per torrent that were not necessarily present in the default .torrent file, so that when a tracker was down, other trackers could do the work. It was the second most popular torrent website in 2012.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tumblr</span> Microblogging and social networking website

Tumblr is a microblogging and social networking website founded by David Karp in 2007 and currently owned by American company Automattic. The service allows users to post multimedia and other content to a short-form blog.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Xtube</span> Pornographic video hosting and social networking site

Xtube was a Canadian pornographic video hosting service and social networking site based in Toronto, Ontario. It was established in 2006 and is notable for being the first adult community site to allow users to upload and share adult videos. Xtube was not a producer of pornography, instead it provided a platform for content uploaded by users. User-submitted content included pornographic videos, webcam models, pornographic photographs, and erotic literature, and incorporated social networking features.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Internet Watch Foundation</span> Registered charity in Cambridge, England

The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) is a global registered charity based in Cambridge, England. It states that its remit is "to minimise the availability of online sexual abuse content, specifically child sexual abuse images and videos hosted anywhere in the world and non-photographic child sexual abuse images hosted in the UK." Content inciting racial hatred was removed from the IWF's remit after a police website was set up for the purpose in April 2011. The IWF used to also take reports of criminally obscene adult content hosted in the UK. This was removed from the IWF's remit in 2017. As part of its function, the IWF says that it will "supply partners with an accurate and current URL list to enable blocking of child sexual abuse content". It has "an excellent and responsive national Hotline reporting service" for receiving reports from the public. In addition to receiving referrals from the public, its agents also proactively search the open web and deep web to identify child sexual abuse images and videos. It can then ask service providers to take down the websites containing the images or to block them if they fall outside UK jurisdiction.

Brazzers is a Canadian pornographic video production company with headquarters in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, and legal domicile in Nicosia, Cyprus. With an online network consisting of thirty-one hardcore pornography websites, the company's slogan is "World's Best HD Porn Site!". The site contains 10,036 videos, which were published by 33 different sites. Their network of sites features 2,340 pornstar models.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Aylo</span> Internet pornography company

Aylo is a Canadian multinational adult entertainment conglomerate owned by Canadian private equity firm Ethical Capital Partners. It is primarily involved in internet pornography, operating a number of video sharing websites, and pornographic film studios such as Brazzers, Digital Playground, Men.com, Reality Kings, Sean Cody, and WhyNotBi.com, among others. Aylo's headquarters are located in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, but the company's corporate structure is divided among entities domiciled in a number of other countries.

xHamster is a pornographic media and social networking site headquartered in Limassol, Cyprus. xHamster serves user-submitted pornographic videos, webcam models, pornographic photographs, and erotic literature and incorporates social networking features. xHamster was founded in 2007. With more than 10 million members, it is the fourth-most popular pornography website on the Internet after XVideos, XNXX and Pornhub. As of January 2024, xHamster was the 20th-most trafficked website in the world.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pornhub</span> Pornographic video-sharing website owned by Aylo

Pornhub is a Canadian-owned internet pornography video-sharing website, one of several owned by adult entertainment conglomerate Aylo. As of February 2024, Pornhub is the 13th-most-visited website in the world and the second-most-visited adult website, after XVideos.

BongaCams is an adult live streaming platform that features content made by webcam models, couples, and camboys. Typical shows include erotic performances that generally involve nudity and provocative yet engaging activities for the viewers; ranging from teasing, stripping, erotic chatting to masturbation with sex toys. All site visitors are able to join online chat rooms, while models earn money by hosting private shows and getting tips from registered users.

References

  1. ↑ "WhiteHouse.com WHOIS, DNS, & Domain Info - DomainTools". WHOIS . 2016. Retrieved 2016-02-21.
  2. ↑ Jeff Peline (1996-09-05). "Whitehouse.com goes to porn". CNET. Retrieved 2020-06-26.
  3. 1 2 "News » Newsletter - Winter 2009". Stop Child Predators. Archived from the original on 2016-10-20. Retrieved 2013-06-03.
  4. ↑ "Main Page". whitehouse.com. Retrieved 2022-07-01.
  5. ↑ Tynan, Dan (2006-09-15). "The 25 Worst Web Sites". PC World . Archived from the original on 2021-05-07. Retrieved 2013-04-20.
  6. ↑ Ruff, Charles F.C. (1997-12-08). "Whitehouse.com letter from the White House". CNET. Archived from the original on 2012-09-06. Retrieved 2020-06-26.
  7. ↑ "Porn site WhiteHouse.com domain name up for sale". Computer World . 2004-02-10. Retrieved 2016-03-02.
  8. ↑ Brides, Ted (2004-02-11). "Whitehouse.com to get out of the porn business". Associated Press. Retrieved 2010-07-13.
  9. ↑ "Main Page". whitehouse.com. Retrieved 2022-07-01.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.