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Part of the controversy about Whitehouse.com is that users wishing to visit the official US White House (www.whitehouse.gov) could easily go to the adult website instead. This once occurred when people left out a TLD when typing in an address and Internet Explorer would assume that they meant to type .com at the end (a mistake that no longer occurs). At present people can accidently visit it by typing www.whitehouse.com by mistake — many new users to the World Wide Web do not realize that a government-owned domain name will usually not end in .com; more seasoned others may simply type it in unthinkingly. www.whitehouse.com also has much more web traffic than www.whitehouse.gov. Unintentional visits to the website appear to be a regular occurrence.
In 1997, the Clinton administration sent Dan Parisis a letter stating, "... we do challenge your right to use the White House, the President, and the First Lady as a marketing device. For adult internet users, that device is, at the least, part of a deceptive scheme. For younger Internet users, it has more disturbing consequences." The letter had no affect and the site stayed up.
In 1998 Jim Salmon was so appalled by the idea of how many kids get tricked into going to this site that he personally pointed all of his domains to that site, hoping to generate enough controversy to get people to shut the site down. He owned 60 TLDs, many of them were country singer domains for popular artists such as LeAnnRimes.com and ShaniaTwain.org. His plan backfired, and instead he started to get heat from country singers who were angry at what he'd done. Dan Parisis put a disclaimer at the top of his site denying any responsibility for all the celebrity domains being pointed at his site. Eventually Salmon conceded and pointed all of his domains back to where they used to be.
In 2004 Parisis decided to sell the domain, mainly because of his son who would be kindergarden the next year. At this point he had been making $1 million USD annually from the site alone. Parisis has said he doesn't want to sell the domain name to anyone in the adult entertainment industry, and even claims to have turned down what was essentially a blank check from a buyer who hid his identity behind his broker.
See also: List of websites, whitehouse.org , typosquattingTyposquatting is a form of cybersquatting which relies on the chances that a person who enters a website address into a web browser will accidentally enter an incorrect website address and be led to an alternative address which the cybersquatter owns.