Oversight made by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), a US civil rights organization, almost led to a major racism scandal in the United States. The NAACP has held the domain names nigger.com, nigger.org and nigger.net for nearly 20 years. Throughout this period, the domains have been non-operational due to the insulting connotation of the word ‘nigger’ as referring to a black person in the US. Use of this word can be considered a racial crime resulting in a strict penalty. The NAACP’s objective in owning the nigger.com, nigger.org and nigger.net domain names is to block their use from any other party.
At the beginning of this year, the civil rights activists failed to renew the registrations. For three weeks, the three domains were in pending renewal/delete status due to the almost lapsed registration rights. The rules are that domains whose names aren’t renewed by their owners prior to the expiration date can be auctioned off. This is how nigger.com appeared on the NameJet list of online auction lots in mid-February. Within just a few days it managed to attract over 70 bids, the highest of which was $10,000, DomainIncite reports. It seems that the NAACP simply forgot to extend the registration period of the domain names, and they appeared on NameJet automatically. This laps could have caused a serious racial scandal which was avoided after the press and the internet community spotted nigger.com among other auction lots. The NAACP now retains control of the three domain names.
