Items Tagged With typosquatting

When I was in college, I took a 'Philosophy of the Law' class, taught by famous libertarian John Hospers, which included as an assigned text "Defending the Undefendable."  (Amazon: Defending the Undefendable: The pimp, prostitute, scab, slumlord, libeler, moneylender and other scapegoats in the rogue's gallery of American society.) It's a book that makes good, logical (and libertarian) arguments about why we shouldn't punish some of the 'undefendable' members of our society, neither in courts of law nor in the court of public opinion.

If the book had been written today, it might have included a chapter on typosquatters.

All of this week's stories are written around a single theme: typosquatting. Five days, five stories about a practice you may have thought had disappeared years ago. To paraphrase Ira Glass, this week's Name Brief is in five acts.

Act One: How to generate your own typo. (Click "Read More" for the rest.)

With 70,964,907 .COM domain names registered (see Name Intelligence's Daily Changes), the name you want is already taken. Even names you wouldn't want in a million years are taken. Names so silly that you'd be embarrassed to use them as the address for your site are taken, and this has been true for many, many years. It's why tech companies end up naming themselves things that look like typographical errors, like "Flickr" or "Joost" or just about any other Web 2.0 company you might find on the TechCrunch index. 

This is where the aftermarket comes in. The aftermarket allocates registered and expired domain names to new registrants looking for a name they couldn't otherwise register as a new name. 

The aftermarket is also a good place to pick up a typographical error name.

On Monday, I talked about "name clouds." A "name cloud" consists of all the names registered around your principal name. For example, once upon a time, if you were starting a new online business, you'd register a name in .COM as your principal name (the dark blue square) and depending on the location of your business, you might have picked up your ccTLD as well (the red square). If you wanted to ensure that no one used a similar name in commerce, you'd register your name in .NET, .ORG, .BIZ and .INFO as well (the yellow squares). Once upon a time, your name cloud might have looked like this:

But that's a very 2002-looking name cloud. Things have changed.

The auction/resale value of domain names based on typographical errors of Bigco web sites isn't based on normal metrics. You may have a name with a lot of traffic, but you always live in the shadow of the law. If you typosquat a trademark, your name could be taken away at any time by a court or a UDRP provider, and there is very little you can do about it. In addition to losing the name, you could lose money, perhaps a lot of money, in a lawsuit brought under the ACPA (Anti-Cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act)...together with the expense and hassle of hiring your own attorney to defend you in what almost certainly will be a losing effort. Typosquatting a Bigco Trademark simply isn't worth it. Which is why a lot of typosquatting has moved to bloggers and podcasters and other individual content creators.

Typosquatting has found a safe and profitable target: the popular little guy.