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Despite strong criticisms from the domain name industry against labeling all Domainers as "Cybersquatters", comes the latest CNet report saying:
Lam [managing director of Singapore-based IP Mirror] said the phenomenon of cybersquatting is global, and the practice is especially popular when it comes to generic top-level domain extensions, such as China's .cn, India's .in and South Korea's .kr.
"The cheaper the domain (name), the more active the cybersquatting activities," Lam said, noting that cybersquatters have now earned a new moniker, "domainers."
"Domainers now are viewed more like merchants who buy and sell domains as part of their business," she explained. "Some even trademark the domain (name) so that it can be sold at a higher price."
Instances of cybersquatting domaining are reported to be growing in Asia, largely due to the availability of inexpensive Asian country code Top-Level Domains such as China's ".cn".
Read full story: CNET News
Related topics: Cybercrime, Cybersquatting, DNS, Domain Names, Top-Level Domains
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Huh. CNet beat me out for radio.com back in 1994. They still own it. And it's parked.
So it look t'me like CNet is calling the kettle black. I think of CNet as one of the most astute domainer outfits out there. I wonder if they're going to divest?
Wow that's a shitty statement from cnet. Another domain-hoarding outfit with some hidden agenda ?
"Domainers" are called that because they want to own domain names but aren't "actual interesting content providers" or "real businesses that name their website after themselves" or even "Dotcom 2.0 Bubble Hype Businesses with marketeer-named websites". If they've got any content besides advertising links, it's usually astroturfed(*) from somewhere else.
They're not all cybersquatters or even typosquatters, though many of them are - some of them have names like "ExampleNounPhrase”.com because people looking for examples of noun phrases type that into their browsers instead of using Google/Yahoo/MSN lookup.
But they're all litterers, clogging up the name space so that when somebody wants to set up a web site with actual content, obvious domain names using the appropriate keywords are often taken, and when somebody wants to search for a topic on a popular search engine, the search gets cluttered up with web pages using domainers' domain names as well as SEO-littered astroturf pages with the topic's keywords in the body, and often both together.
I'm not sure that there's any obvious way to prevent the non-trademark-infringing domainers, though eliminating or charging for domain tasting would be a major step, as well as making sure the mechanisms for renewing domain names work well (and work across registrars) to reduce squatting on established domain name owners. There's certainly no scalable automated way to look at www.ExampleNounPhrase.com to decide if it's bogus, even though a human can generally recognize it at a glance. But I wish they'd go away so that the least valuable content in the domain name space can at least belong to online-dogfood-sellers and teenage angst blogsites the way the RFC819 authors intended it to.
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