Whitehouse.com: The Accidental Internet Scandal That Shocked America
From Civics to Chaos
It’s the late ‘90s, and the internet is new. You need info about the U.S. government, so you do the obvious thing: You type whitehouse.com into your browser. And then…BAM. Not democracy. Not the branches of government. But a full-blown adult website. Cue the gasps. Cue the frantic closing of browser windows. Cue millions of kids having some very awkward conversations with their parents and teachers.
The Man Behind the Mistake (or Genius Move?)
This wasn’t just a happy accident for whoever owned the site. Nope—this was a business decision made by a guy named Dan Parisi.
In 1997, Parisi registered whitehouse.com, initially intending to make it a political discussion site. But he soon realized something very profitable: people were mistyping whitehouse.gov, the actual website for the U.S. government, and landing on his domain instead.
And in the Wild West era of the early internet, mistyped domains were a goldmine.
Parisi, seeing dollar signs, pivoted his website into an adult entertainment platform—and the traffic exploded. At its peak, the site was reportedly getting over 80,000 visitors a day and making $1 million a year.
Schools Blocked It & Parents Freaked Ou
Naturally, this didn’t go unnoticed. Schools across the country scrambled to block the site. Parents demanded action.
Even the White House Counsel’s Office stepped in, sending Parisi a cease and desist letter in 1997, arguing that he was exploiting the White House name for profit.
But the site kept running.
It became one of the first major internet scandals, highlighting the growing pains of a world suddenly connected by the web. Before parental controls were a thing and before most people even understood how domains worked, one typo could turn a civics lesson into a crisis.
The End of Whitehouse.com’s Reign
By 2004, Parisi decided he’d had enough. Maybe it was the backlash, maybe it was the fact that his own son was starting kindergarten. Whatever the reason, he shut the site down and tried to sell the domain.
It didn’t work.
Over the years, whitehouse.com went through multiple reinventions—becoming everything from a real estate site to a political commentary platform. Today, it’s just a generic political polling and betting site.
The Legacy of the Biggest Typo in Internet History
The Whitehouse.com fiasco is one of those early internet stories that perfectly captures the chaos of the dot-com boom. It showed just how valuable domains could be, how easy it was to mislead people online, and how one guy could make a million bucks off accidental clicks.
It’s also a reminder of just how much the internet has changed. These days, schools have filters, browsers have safeguards, and most people are a little more careful with their URLs.
But for anyone who was online in the ‘90s, Whitehouse.com remains a legendary cautionary tale—proof that, back in the day, one wrong keystroke could take you from civics class to catastrophe.
