Seen a Rogue on the loose? Get in touch with our Roguemeister: JOHN SCHRAG jschrag@wweek.com (503) 243-2122 FAX: (503) 243-1115 Imagine you're a business owner and someone moved your building in the middle of the night. You can't find it--and neither can your customers. That, in essence, is what happened to Ken Bilderback, manager of the New Media Group at The Columbian Publishing Co. in Vancouver. In addition to publishing Vancouver's daily newspaper, CPC publishes pdxguide.com and several other Internet sites. Bilderback came into work on Jan. 3 to find that one of his clients, Portland's Indian Art Northwest, had lost its Internet domain name, northwestindian.com. When you entered the URL, all you got was an error message. Y2K Bug? No. Blame here goes to an innocent typo and a roguishly unresponsive company. Before you set up a Web site, you first need to make sure no one else has the name you want to use. A lucrative domain-name market has sprung up, and it's dominated by Network Solutions out of Virginia. Randy Sekerez of Crown Point, Ind., contacted Network Solutions to register his site, northwestindiana.com. But Sekerez forgot to type the "a" at the end of the name and, in the click of a button, the Web presence of Portland's Celebration of Native Arts & Culture disappeared. That should not have happened. Network Solutions is supposed to verify domain name changes. For example, it should have not processed Sekerez's request without a notarized signature from the original owner of the domain name he wanted. If it had taken that step, it would have caught the typo. After several weeks, Bilderback finally got the matter cleared up, but not before Northwest Solutions had compounded its bureaucratic blunder by trying to charge him a $70 reactivation fee to get his old site back. The company did not return several calls from WW. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Willamette Week | originally published January 26, 2000