I was researching whether or not food companies were required to disclose whether or not their product contained "high fructose corn syrup" or just simply "corn syrup".
I didn't find the answer, but I came across as website called "Sweet Surprise" which appeared to me to be trying too hard to present "scientific" data. Curious who was running the site, I looked up the whois record for the domain name. A sweet surprise - the domain name is privately registered! Privately registered, or proxy domains as they are sometimes called, are required to include the registrant's name. This domain only included "DDB Chicago", which I did a quick search for and found the website for DDB, an ad agency. No sign of their work for corn syrup manufacturers, but a search for "DDB Chicago" and corn turns up several articles about a work that DDB has done for the Corn Refiners Association.
Digging deeper on the technical side of things turns up more interesting results. A reverse DNS lookup for the IP address of the website "Sweet Surprise" reveals that the IP is delegated to... the Corn Refiners Association.
dig -x 206.251.131.45 ; <<>> DiG 9.5.1-P2 <<>> -x 206.251.131.45 ;; global options: printcmd ;; Got answer: ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 31669 ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0 ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;45.131.251.206.in-addr.arpa. IN PTR ;; ANSWER SECTION: 45.131.251.206.in-addr.arpa. 10786 IN PTR sweetsurpriseweb.corn.org. ;; Query time: 1 msec ;; SERVER: 192.168.1.1#53(192.168.1.1) ;; WHEN: Tue Nov 17 15:12:09 2009 ;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 84
