Rand Paul's presidential campaign has already suffered an unfortunate outlay: a $100,980 ransom check for randpaul.com. The National Journal reports that Paul dropped the huge sum on a "domain name" days before he announced his campaign. Domain squatting, for those unfamiliar, is the art of sitting on potentially juicy domains, like pizza.com, and then selling them at astronomical prices — sometimes for millions of dollars.
A URL like randpaul.com is some real primo domain space that Paul probably felt he needed to have. His biggest competitor, Hillary Clinton, already owns hillaryclinton.com. But that hasn't stopped squatters from trying to cash in on her candidacy. The most expensive Clinton-related URL appears to be hillarynotpresident.com, which is currently on sale for $295,000.
The only thing more offensive than domain squatting is its other official name: "cybersquatting" (as in, for example, the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act). No matter who wins in 2016, we hope their first act as president will be to eradicate this cyberjargon from cyberexistence.