One of the multi-million dollar programs canceled by the government was the Canadian Unity Council:

The federal government has cut $13 million in funding to the Canadian Unity Council because it's time for a "fresh approach," Heritage Minister Bev Oda says.

Oda praised the work the council has done in the past, but said it was not reflecting changing demographics.

"There was not that much awareness, particularly with the newer Canadians," she said.

The council, a non-partisan group, was founded in 1964 as Quebec francophones began to raise questions about federalism.

Non-partisan?  Well, it had plenty of Liberal friends on the Board of Directors over the years (I see France Chrétien-Desmarais, Robert Fragasso, Marie-Hélène Fox, Paul J. Massicotte, and plenty of others) but then there were Conservative and even NDP appointees as well.  Bob Rae was the Chairman of the Board in 2005.  Bob Rae did not officially apply to become a Liberal until April 5, 2006, so I guess that counts as an NDP appointee.  But then who knows what influential Liberals knew about Bob Rae's long term political plans?

But aside from the question of partisanship (and to be honest, it was probably as non-partisan as any organization entirely dependent on government funding could be), the CUC certainly seemed like a convenient parking space for party loyalists on their way up or on their way down.

Whatever the reason, Stephen Harper came to the decision to shut it down altogether, instead of invest the time, money, and effort to replace Liberal appointees with Conservative appointees.

But this post is not about the wisdom of that decision.  It is about pornography.

You see, when the organization was rolled up in 2006, ownership of the domain name for the website, cucweb.ca, was allowed to expire.  It was immediately grabbed by online entrepeneurs, and is now under the ownership of Rob Hall:

In Pool.com's boardroom, the lights are dimmed in anticipation of a daily and immensely profitable Internet ritual.

The 2 p.m. occurrence is called the "drop" -- a cyberspace free-for-all in which the Ottawa company and its rivals vie to harvest expired Internet domain names.

Be they "google.com" or "kinkyguy.ca," such names are not owned in perpetuity. In most cases, they must be renewed each year, but many are not.

On average, the ownership of 22,000 or the world's 40 million or so domain names expires each day. When the computers of VeriSign, the U.S. company which manages the Internet's dot-com and dot-net registries, releases the lapsed names each afternoon, they "drop" like ripe fruit to the ground. Then, "drop-catchers" such as Pool.com go to work, armed with specialized software and powerful servers, grabbing the bounty as best they can, hoping to sell what they gather to new owners.

"The key is to get the right name at the right place at the right time... Our (acquisition) engine predicts when they drop to the millisecond," says Rob Hall, Pool.com's chairman and CEO of the Momentous group of companies, which includes Pool.com.

So what has Rob Hall done with the former address of the Canadian Unity Council?  It is now a portal for live chats with pornstars:

LIVE PORNOSTAR CHAT

Live sex chat with Shy Girl Alone hosts on webcam (Blonde) featuring horny ... I'M LIVE View My Profile: PORNOSTAR*****C OME JOIN ME IN VIDEO .. LETS CELEBRATE TOGETHER ,,LET ME ...

and so on and so forth.

I suppose this sort of thing might have happened accidentally or deliberately.

Accidentally?  The CUC shuts down, vacates the offices, turns off the phone lines, and cancels their server contracts to support the website.  But ownership of the domain name is merely allowed to expire in due time.  Rob Hall picks it up.

Deliberately?  A more paranoid interpretation might be considered if you believe that the government is making sure the CUC never comes back.  The ownership is allowed to expire in the hope that it is turned into some money-making operation (not necessarily pornographic), so that a resurrected CUC in the future would have to establish a new web presence.

I think that's a stretch, especially since the government didn't actually own the domain name.  If the CUC people had decided to transfer ownership to Bob Rae for him to hold on to it quietly against the day when the CUC would return, the government couldn't have prevented it.

In any case, I doubt very much anyone on either side of the CUC funding issue was thinking about this.

But there is something government officials ought to think about.  On government webpages, there are references to the CUC, including references to the website.  These are old pages, like this one from Canadian Heritage, but they have not been taken down.  This particular page prints out two CUC website URLs, and all CUC URLs now map back to the home page and the invitation to the pornostar chat.

But then it is this sort of linking that makes cucweb.ca such an attractive property at the time of the "drop".

In principle, this is no different than an old government webpage giving a street address, and finding out that the building has become an adult novelties shop.  But with webpage URLs, there is the ability for someone to immediately follow the link, and to end up in an entirely unexpected place.  At least with the street address, you'd realize the mistake from the sidewalk and never have to enter.  And unlike remodeling a store or an office as part of starting a new business, recasting a website from a political advocacy group to a porn site requires next to no effort at all.  Indeed, you could simply redirect the URL to an existing porn site in your portfolio with a simple .htaccess file.  With wildcards, the redirection would handle all deeper pages in the website.  The job takes all of five minutes.

So what should happen?  Well, probably nothing with regards to the domain.  The government did not own CUC properties.  It was up to the CUC to wind things down.  But as a manager of a large number of online pages, the government ought to be aware that it can suffer from link rot.  Most of the time you can't predict when a link will go bad, but when the government causes a third party like the CUC to be closed down, the breakdown in the linkage is almost inevitable.  It might make sense to do a scan for links to pages for that third party, and consider removing the links, or replacing the links to a government-owned page that explains the situation.

I have no problem with Rob Hall making a living the way he does.  And that he gets free hits to his porn site from links on government websites is a testament to his cleverness and good business sense.  But the IT guys in Ottawa aren't under any obligation to keep that traffic flowing.

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