Holders of a .COM are fighting with their .GR brothers!
Nowadays most web sites with international appeal use the .com regardless of the country of primary operation.
Quite often, ccTLDs are either obscure and hard to remember, or visitors by word of mouth type in the .com by instinct.
The “Get Greece Back” initiative is a scheduled reaction against the ongoing situation in Greece, where oppressive politics and financial austerity is being met with an “enough is enough” attitude.
Simply put, the Greeks have had it; wages haven’t increased in 10+ years while cost of living skyrocketed since the introduction of the euro. So a group of people registered GetGreeceback.com and built a web site on it, proclaiming their cause and issued a petition.
With several thousand participants and thousands of Facebook members, GetGreeceBack.com is a fine example of how to organize people from remote locations, joined in a common cause: to improve quality of life and to change the way politicians function.
Within days of introducing “Get Greece Back”, two things happened: First, Antonis Samaras, leader of the opposition party New Democracy used the exact same phrase at a speech to followers, asking for his party’s supporters to help “get Greece back“.
Second, some smart blogger/entrepreneur registered GetGreeceBack.gr – the local ccTLD – and started posting borderline nationalist content, on top of which he placed paid advertisements.
Surely, politics alone does not pay the bills! 😀
The creators of GetGreeceBack.com have not welcomed this apparent abuse of their motto; the ongoing friction and battle of “impression” between the holders of the .COM and the .GR is currently a major issue in the Greek blogosphere, where accusations fly left and right.
Greeks are avid readers of political blogs and despise the so-called traditional press and media.
In July, Socrates Giolias – the late administrator of popular scandal-hounding blog “Troktiko” – was gunned down outside of his apartment, in an apparent assassination by paid killers; the politically-charged Greeks saw this as an attempt to silence Troktiko.blogspot.com which indeed shut down its virtual doors a few days later.
To bad, they should have registered the .com AND the .gr!!