To the astonishment of the owners of the veteran chareidi Hebrew news website Ladaat.net, when visitors to the site clicked on the URL late Wednesday night it directed them to another site, Shtieble.net. It appears that due to an oversight, the owners of the Ladaat site neglected to renew the domain address, and it was promptly snatched up by the competitor’s site, which also portrays itself as a chareidi news site, albeit a newcomer to the industry.
YWN-ISRAEL contacted the owners of Ladaat, frum brothers who built the site and have worked tirelessly for the past decade to maintain it, bringing quality news to the Hebrew-speaking public. They recently invested a significant sum of money to revamp the page as well. The owners of Ladaat are taking appropriate legal action against Shtieble.net, as well as posting a banner article on the site speaking of the “despicable actions” of the competitor, not holding back in its criticism of another frum site that would engage in such an undermining act.
For those wishing to view Ladaat, the URL is now Ladaat.info.
(YWN – Israel Desk, Jerusalem)
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9 Responses
Please report accurate news if you check on both laddat.info Site and on Shtieble.net you will see another story
You say you contacted ladaat. How about contacting shtieble? All you have to do is go to the website and read what they have to say about the situation.
Regardless, it’s pretty stupid to let a domain name lapse.
I built a web site for a very popular kiruv organization about 7 years ago. I got a frantic call a year later from the head that a “shmutz” site took it over.
Turned out that he ignored the renew emails and a “shmutz” site bought it and held him ransom for several thousand dollars to buy it back. In the meantime frum people saw the worst from the site.
I advise everyone to take renew options very seriously. There are stinkers out there on the web.
I’m not sure why this is “despicable”….its called free-market competition. If someone allows a patent or trademark to expire, its no longer their protected intellectual property and anyone else has an absolute right to use it. Likewise, these two borthers clearly didn’t care enough about their website domain name and so its fair game to be picked up by competitors.
This is a good example of how a well-meaning journalist can be guilty of lashon hara. It is true that someone redirected ladaat.net to shtiebel – but how do you know it was the owners of shtiebel? In fact, they claim they had nothing to do with it: click here. We must all learn to be dan l’chaf zechus as our first reaction.
it’s similar to the law suit here in the US when some one reserved the domains “walmart.com” “kmart.com” or the like (very early on in the web era), and then demanded thousends to resell them. The judge said he has no right to do that.
The former owners of the domain name let it expire. Therefore it no longer belongs to them. The new owners of the domain name legally purchased a legally available domain name. They can choose to point it to any website of their choosing. Including to a competitor of the former owner. They legally and fully own the domain now.
Furthermore, if there is any disputes regarding the domain ownership, only an American court can rule on it since the domain is registered in the U.S. via GoDaddy, an American domain name registrar that is subject to U.S. law and U.S. jurisdiction.
הה”ד לא כי לא כצורנו צורם
Editors, why is this libelous article still online?