In Brief: Ad Roasts Firm That Shut Morgan Site

NEW YORK - J.P. Morgan & Co. chairman and chief executive officer Douglas A. Warner 3d was greeted Tuesday morning by a full-page ad in The Wall Street Journal reminding him of what he would surely sooner forget:

Morgan's Web site went down earlier this month because of an unpaid $35 bill to its technology vendor. Register.com, a New York Internet company, placed the ad to poke fun at its archrival, Network Solutions, which counts Morgan as one of its clients and which cut off the banking company's e-mail and Web site because Morgan did not pay its account on time. The ad, in letter form, tries to convince Mr. Warner to switch companies.

"I don't think we were trying to embarrass anyone," said Sascha Mornell, senior vice president of sales and marketing at register.com. "We were trying to highlight the fact that register.com would take the steps" to prevent a corporate Web site from being shut down.

A Morgan spokesman declined to comment.

Mr. Mornell said he had not gotten a response from Morgan. Register.com placed a similar ad last winter addressed to Bill Gates, the chairman of Microsoft Corp., which had a similar problem. Mr. Gates did not respond either, Mr. Mornell said.

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