A cybersquatter owns the Harris-Walz domain name, for now : NPR

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By the time Vice President Kamala Harris announced Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate on Tuesday, the website HarrisWalz.com was already taken.

In fact, it was snatched up four years ago — and not by either candidate, but by a politically prescient, Brooklyn-based millennial.

Jeremy Green Eche, 36, is a trademark attorney who also runs an online marketplace where people can buy and sell registered trademarks and domains. He’s probably better known as a domain investor.

“I also freely call myself a domain squatter or a cybersquatter,” he says. “It’s a pejorative term, but I don’t mind using it because it’s still accurate.”

A couple times a year, Eche goes on a “buying spree” on sites like GoDaddy and Name.com, purchasing domain names for all sorts of hypothetical presidential tickets.

In August 2020, anticipating Harris might run again in the future, he snapped up 15 Harris-related domain names, combined with “every sort of folksy white man I could think of who was big at the time.” Those include Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee and, of course, Walz.

It’s largely guesswork, though Eche keeps up with politics (he’s a member of New York City’s Democratic Socialists of America chapter) and links his knack for recognizing rising political stars to his college gig as an autograph dealer.

“There’s probably like four or five other people doing it and I don’t know them,” he says of cybersquatting. “I just think it’s really fun to register a domain and then have this kind of payoff where I just hit the jackpot and I get a little news cycle and it’s just kind of a good time for me.”

He’s gotten it right before

Eche pays about $10 to register each domain, and renews them annually in the hopes that he might eventually strike gold.

And he actually did back in 2016, as the owner of ClintonKaine.com, when then-Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton chose Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine. He had also claimed ClintonBooker.com, anticipating a ticket with New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, and ClintonBiden.com in case Joe Biden was her running mate.

Eche, who went by Jeremy Peter Green before he married, told NPR’s Morning Edition at the time that he was living in a basement and off of credit card debt, and hoping to sell the domain for at least $10,000. But the Clinton campaign only offered $2,000.

He says he ultimately sold the site for $15,000 to a different, anonymous buyer, which turned out to be the Trump campaign. They used the website to publish anti-Clinton news during the election.

“Honestly, back in 2016, I got really depressed when the Clinton campaign didn’t even make me a serious offer,” he said on Tuesday. “I’m hoping the people at the Harris campaign are maybe a little more savvy, a little more on top of things, especially now that they see what happened last time.”

Eche is hoping that Harris’ campaign will buy the site at that same $15,000 price tag, adding: “Adjusting for inflation, this is a pretty good deal.”

The Harris campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Eche says he’s pleased that Harris chose Walz, for both political and personal reasons. Among them, he finally feels qualified to call himself “the best political cybersquatter ever.”

“I feel a little bit like someone who went to the Olympics eight years ago and did well and then missed out on it in Tokyo and then came back and got a gold medal again,” Eche said. “I feel like the GOAT of this very, very small niche of cybersquatting.”

While Eche had the hypothetical Harris-Walz domain on lock for years, he surely couldn’t have predicted the twists and turns that this election cycle would take — from President Biden embarking on a second term and withdrawing, then the Democratic party coalescing around Harris as the nominee and her choosing Walz out of a crowded pool of contenders.

In fact, Eche says he barely had time to prepare. In 2016, he embellished ClintonKaine.com with homemade comics and fan fiction, to give people something to look at. This time around, he had just enough time to make a single meme, at his wife’s suggestion.

The Harris-Walz website bears the now-familiar green background and all lowercase “walz,” mirroring the aesthetic of Charli XCX’s widely-memed album “Brat.” The Harris-Pritzker site looks the same, only with “prit.” Clicking on those two pages takes users to Eche’s online marketplace, with a list of other hypothetical Harris domains and the option to buy HarrisWalz.com.

“Not only are these domains valuable for the 2024 election, but they will also retain their value in 2028 if Harris runs in that year,” it reads. “This makes them an excellent investment.”

He is already looking beyond November

Eche is also looking a few years ahead.

He has 10 different domains for Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who many expect will run in the future. His hypothetical running mates for her include Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly and Illinois Sen. Tammy Duckworth. He’s offering them at $3,400 apiece.

He’s also in the process of buying back the Clinton-Kaine domain name — in part because of its “sentimental value” from the person who bought it after the Trump campaign let it expire. He does Republican domain names too, and says his best one this year was TrumpCotton.com (until Trump did not pick Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, that is.)

Not one to rule out any political possibilities, Eche says he’s holding on to some domains for a potential Walz-led ticket too, just in case he one day runs for president.

“Though honestly, I don’t have enough,” he says. “I should buy some before this story comes out.”