Donuts confirms six-figure .news buyer used a fake name
Mike Texas is in fact noted conspiracy theorist Mike Adams.
New gTLD registry Donuts confirmed with DI over the weekend that the buyer of six figures worth of “platinum” .news domain names used a fake name.
The company last week said that a company called WebSeed bought registry-reserved names including science.news, climate.news, medicine.news, health.news and pollution.news.
After a small amount of digging, I discovered that these sites were affiliated with a controversial site called Natural News, which is regularly criticized for spreading bogus, anti-science content.
I suspected that “Mike Texas”, the WebSeed CEO quoted railing against “fake news” in Donuts’ press release, was very probably a pseudonym for Natural News owner Mike Adams, who calls himself the “Health Ranger” but peddles theories often characterized as dangerous.
Yesterday, Donuts told us that, following DI’s coverage, it has managed to confirm with Texas that he is in fact Adams. The company has changed its press release accordingly.
I will note that the most compelling piece of evidence connecting Texas to Adams was a pre-GDPR Whois record.
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Donuts big mistake. You don’t send out a PR if you don’t do sufficient due diligence to be 100% correct.
Bad news for .news. One of the most basic premises of domains is to instill confidence.
This does the opposite. And not even talking about the controversial info on the sites.
Great investigative work DI. Maybe Donuts should hire you 🙂
Mike Texas aka Health Ranger – sounds like an attempted rip of Walker Texas Ranger to me.
Maybe he thinks he’s Chuck Norris ?