Ted Cruz dot com: A domain name cautionary tale
On March 23rd, Texas Republican senator and Tea Party favorite Ted Cruz announced that he was going to run for president. If you then went running to his website, tedcruz.com, to see what he had to say you would have been shocked to see the message, "SUPPORT PRESIDENT OBAMA. IMMIGRATION REFORM NOW!"
What the heck happened? Had Cruz's site already been hacked? Nope, it turns out that he's never owned this site.
It appears, according to the Whois record for his domain, that "Cruz's" domain is registered with GoDaddy. Its owner is hidden by the company Domains By Proxy. This business, owned by GoDaddy founder Bob Parsons, specializes in hiding domain name owners' real identities from researchers.
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However, Domains by Proxy couldn't disguise that tedcruz.com has been around since April 20, 2004. This was long before Cruz would run for his first public office in the 2012 Texas U.S. Senate race.
Patrick Caldwell, a Mother Jones reporter, discovered that tedcruz.com actually belongs to an Arizona real-estate attorney who's also named Ted Cruz. From 2008 to 2009, Cruz used the site for his business. By 2014, the Arizonian Cruz clearly found that he disagreed with his more famous Texas counterpart.
Given his political opinion, and that the Texan (by way of Canada) Cruz didn't get the site during his Senate run, it seems unlikely that Senator Cruz will be using this site anytime soon. Candidate Cruz's real websites are his U.S. Senate site and his campaign site, TedCruz.org.
So, if you're thinking your little boy or girl might be president one day, register their domain name now! By the time they're old enough to vote, never mind run, it may be too late for them to get their best site.
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