Soo’s suitors

>> Owner of montreal.com name ain’t buckling under

by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

In late 1994, while many Montrealers were getting in a lather over the upcoming referendum and the Expos’ stolen season, a West Island computer tech aficionado quietly filed an application for an Internet domain name. On October 14 of that year, Ben Soo was granted the title to www.montreal.com and he soon set up a Web portal that now attracts 30,000 hits a day, offering a discussion board, theatre reviews and other original material.

Big corporations have been trying to bully, squeeze and grab the reigns of the catchy domain name since.

The latest chapter in the ongoing saga comes courtesy of the Greater Montreal Convention and Tourism Bureau Inc. The non-profit, privately run group was founded in 1919 and unites 750 members, ranging from the City of Montreal to Visa. It collects 60 per cent of its budget from the local hotel tax, and spends about 70 per cent of its cash on advertising to attract tourists to the city.
In spite of their power, influence and big bucks, the tourism folks are stuck with the uninspiring domain name www.tourisme-montreal.org. So the jealous tourism folks recently mailed Soo some correspondence via registered mail that he describes as a “vaguely threatening letter.”

“In my experience in the networking world, people can get pretty brusque, but it’s kind of uncommon for someone to send a threatening letter. At least it sounds threatening. It could be a problem in translation, but we passed it around the office for comment and everybody says it sounds like a collection agency letter,” says Soo.

Soo says the letter questions the legitimacy of his maintaining the montreal.com name because his is “not a permanent site for tourism in Montreal.”

“It’s kind of weird,” says Soo. “It’s not unusual that they’d want the domain name, but it’s just the way that they’re trying to get it is questionable.” If he’s unwilling to hand the domain name over, the tourism board wants Soo to give them free advertising, in the form of “a permanent banner to us at no cost in order to establish a hyperlink.” There’s no hint at a cash offer for the domain name.

Soo says he has received about eight “serious offers” to buy the montreal.com name in the past few years, including one from the Southam newspaper chain, which controls the domain names of several other Canadian cities. Southam offered $8,000, while another more dubious party promised “up to” $250,000 in a profit-sharing arrangement during the height of the dot-com boom.

Charles Lapointe, president of the Montreal tourism board, says he knows nothing about the letter that webmaster Yannick Bédard describes as more of an offer than a threat. Bédard says that his people would “like to come to an agreement with the montreal.com people. We think it’d be easier for tourists if we had that domain because we control all the tourism information for the city.”

Soo, meanwhile, says he has no plans to surrender his domain name and hopes that he and his staff of five could eventually turn a profit on montreal.com, which already contains theatre reviews, tech articles by Emru Townsend and a constantly updated city news weblog by Kate McDonnell. “We’re basically trying to tell people about the interesting things that make Montreal what it is,” says Soo. ::