The leaderless Occupy Wall Street protests have just gotten a little more orderly with a new online domain to call home: occupywallstreet.net. OWS member Jake DeGroot finalized the deal to purchase the domain name for $8,000, after it was met with approval at General Assembly at Zuccotti Park this week. “We would hesitate to use the term branding, necessarily, because of the corporate connotations to that, but there are advantages to the identity of the movement. It’s important that we have a full, robust Web presence and strategy,” DeGroot, a theatrical-lighting designer who lives in Queens, told the Wall Street Journal.
Since OWS began inhabiting Zuccotti in mid-September, their online presence has been spread out between Adbusters-owned websites such as Occupywallstreet.org and occupywallst.org, as well as Twitter accounts, nycga.net, Tumblrs, livestreams and more. The group purchased the newest site from 53-year-old Florida resident Mark R. Ellis, who makes a living buying and selling domain names. He registered occupywallstreet.net on Sept. 23, six days after the occupation of Zuccotti Park began.
The hope is that the new .net domain will serve as an umbrella under which all the various appendages of the OWS movement can organize. They are hoping to have a working version up in two or three weeks, with plans to add a blogging platform and news aggregator over time.
But some protesters were upset over the price of the domain—OWS has been struggling with how to organize their finances and properly spend it (let alone get all of it). As you can see on the latest finance sheet from October 24th above, "Communications" (which includes computers, WiFi networks and livestreaming equpiment) is already their largest line item, more than food. And this domain purchase will likely be the single biggest expense to date, though the WSJ notes it only represents less than 2 percent of what the group had raised as of October 18.
