YNOT EUROPE – Someday government agencies will realize allowing URL registrations to lapse seldom is a good idea. For the price of an annual registration fee, the Indian Embassy in Bahrain could have prevented a teen porn TGP site from taking over a domain the embassy no longer uses but many people still have bookmarked.

The embassy used IndianEmbassy-bah.com until last year, when the official website was moved to IndianEmbassyBahrain.com. As soon as the original URL’s registration lapsed, a porn-site operator in Cyprus registered it, slapped up a quickie TGP, and now presumably is raking in cash from a plethora of affiliate programs to which he sends the traffic that intended to visit the virtual embassy.

Adding insult to injury, the teen porn website appears before the legitimate embassy site in Google’s search results for “Indian Embassy Bahrain.”

“The embassy should not have let the name go and should have secured it, even if they had to change the administrator,” said a spokesman for Batelco, the local telecom that hosts the official embassy site.

Embassy officials said they were “shocked” to discover porn at their old online address.

“We stopped using this address in July last year after we were not satisfied with the service we were provided by the administrators,” an embassy spokesperson told Gulf Daily News. “But since [the switch], we have had scores of calls from people complaining about the old address being used for pornography.”

The spokesperson said the embassy tried to contact the new owner of the old domain, but have been unable to locate a certain Kuzmin Maxim. In fact they are not sure any of the ownership information listed for the site is correct.

“Under the circumstances, there is nothing we can do but keep telling people about the new address,” the spokesperson said.

Batelco used the incident as a “don’t let this happen to you” warning for all of its customers, advising them to maintain registrations for abandoned URLs even if they never plan to use the domains again.