Some Guy in the UK Is Using DavidCameron.com for Christian Evangelism

The UK General Election campaign officially started today, and you might think it's time to do a little internet research on the major candidates. The most intense scrutiny is on current Prime Minister David Cameron and Leader of the Opposition Ed Miliband. Perhaps you'd think to start with davidcameron.com and edmiliband.com?

But both these pages look suspiciously similar. They're both pretty basic Blogger layouts with content you probably wouldn't expect either politician to support. A sidebar on davidcameron.com proclaims "Christian resistance to amoral politics" (presumably Cameron doesn't think the politics he's involved in are so "amoral") while the most recent post on edmiliband.com states that "things could not be looking worse for the Labour Party", which would be a rather defeatist attitude for someone hoping to come top of the polls in May. Both pages have identical sections dedicated to banking reform, unemployment, and strong views on abortion, where current laws are declared "an unholy mess."

Clearly, these sites don't belong to Cameron or Miliband. Last week, US Senator Ted Cruz was mocked for not owning his dotcom domain—go to tedcruz.com and you're encouraged to "Support President Obama." It seems something similar has happened to the UK's Conservative and Labour party leaders.

A whois search reveals the domains are both registered by one Reza Sobati, of the organisation Vital Domains Ltd. Using the contact email listed, I reached out to Sobati. In a phone call, he explained that he bought up many domains early on in the web. Many of the domains his company offers are generic names like kettles.co.uk and toasters.co.uk.

The domains linked to politician's names, however, are clearly not a random cyber landgrab, and Sobati confirmed he was responsible for the content on these sites. He said that this started in 1999 when he became involved in the Jubilee Debt Campaign to scrap third-world debt. He started by registering gordonbrown.com (Brown was then chancellor of the Exchequer and later became prime minister).

Sobati's idea was to try to attract politicians' attention. "They're quite vain and they will check what's on their dotcom," he said.

He got hold of the party leader domains before they were in that position, but said it's quite easy to predict which politicians will stick around. He also has davidmiliband.com; David Miliband lost the Labour party leadership to his brother in 2010.

The domains that attract most traffic are those of politicians who are currently in office, and while people are nowadays more likely to access sites through a search engine rather than typing out the domain name itself, Sobati said that, "As long as you're on the first page of Google, you get quite a healthy amount of traffic." He tries to keep the pages going through search engine optimization techniques like updating and including inbound links from his other sites. According to him, he gets close to 5,000 visitors a day.

Across the sites, Sobati said his main idea was to present "a Christian voice in politics" but that he was keen to leave it quite open, pointing to a forum on davidcameron.com that is also linked through from edmiliband.com. A few usernames seem to be dominating recent discussion.

He's not worried that people will mistake the sites as the politicians' own. "There is a veneer of that," he said, but noted that the tabs at the top of the davidcameron.com page—which include "Occupy Movement," "Wikileaks," and "Political Rant"—were pretty obvious indicators that the sites aren't official. Additionally, while you might definitely expect a US politician to own their .com, it's not so common in the UK.

A Labour Party spokesperson said, "edmiliband.com has no connection to Ed Miliband or the Labour Party. Ed Miliband and the Labour Party use Facebook, Twitter and Instagram."

I attempted to reach the Conservative Party through their website and by phone but received no response.

As for other UK politicians, nickclegg.com redirects to the Liberal Democrats homepage, and nigelfarage.com presents the same as the UKIP site.

Sobati said that people were preoccupied with the monetary worth of the domains—a Guardian article from 1999 quoted Sobati as saying he'd sell gordonbrown.com for more than £30,000—but to him it's more about recognising the potential to use them as a platform for a political voice. He described his politics as "Christian left."

Nevertheless, he said he was "willing to listen to all sensible offers."

Masters of their Domain is a column that investigates who owns popular or interesting domain names, and what they're doing with them.