Photo Courtesy of Ka Leody De Guzman Facebook Page
The camp of presidential candidate and labor leader Leody de Guzman on Thursday said it was exploring the possibility of suing those behind a “domain grabbing” incident which used his name for a URL, or uniform resource locator, that, when clicked, brings the user to a rival bet’s website.
De Guzman last weekend launched his website, kaleody.org. However, kaleody.com, which redirects to Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s website, was created and activated a few days later.
“We are studying the filing of a case against those behind this domain grabbing. It’s very clear that the intention of this ‘dirty trick’ is to create confusion and sabotage the campaign of others,” De Guzman said in a statement.
“We expect that an election with elites and traditional parties will be dirty, but I did not expect that they would even steal my name,” he added.
Dangerous
An initial internet search shows the domain was recently bought from a Canada-based domain name provider. Any person may buy the domain name and redirect it to any website, but users may also report abuses to the provider.
De Guzman called on government agencies that have jurisdiction over such matters to conduct their own investigation of the incident.
“It’s dangerous when persons wanting to be president believe that they and their supporters are exempted from the law … Let them be warned because we won’t let them get away with this shamelessness,” he added. —Jerome Aning