GENEVA -- Anti-globalization activists have enraged the
World Trade Organization with a phony Web site that looks just like the
real thing but alters the site's text and mentions profit at every
opportunity.
"A fake WTO Web site - http://www.gatt.org/ - has been created to
deceive Internet users by copying the entire official WTO website. While
the design is identical, the texts have been distorted," the organization
said on its real site, http://www.wto.org/.
To confuse
users further, the fake site copies the warning, but accuses the WTO of
being the impostor.
The name of the fake website is the acronym
for the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs, a body which was replaced
by the WTO in 1995.
The WTO is preparing for a key ministerial
meeting next month in the Gulf state of Qatar to try to launch a new round
of trade talks after failure at the last meeting in 1999 in Seattle that
was besieged by anti-globalization protesters.
The WTO faced a
similar Internet attack before Seattle.
Supporters of the
142-nation trade body have urged it to be more active in responding to
"dirty tricks" by anti-globalization activists.
The Google
Internet search engine lists the gatt.org site as belonging to RTMark, an
Internet community (http://www.rtmark.com/) that says it
"supports the sabotage (informative alteration) of corporate products" in
order to "improve culture."