You all remember cybersquatting, a popular sport in the late 90s, right? McDonalds.com, JenniferLopez.com, Hertz.com and Avon.com thankfully all point to the right web sites today, but thaiairline.com, mcdonald.com, luftansa.com, gugle.com, barnesandnobles.com and other misspellings are fake web sites intended to trap the casual surfer with a hand that's a bit too much quicker than the eye... If you want to go to the McDonalds web site, you don't even spend the 10 seconds to look it up -- you will type McDonalds.com and expect to see the latest dollar meal menu. But the same is true for the other popular form of communication -- email... more
Many of us were expecting radical changes in 2010 to the domain name market. There definitely were some of those -- just not the ones I expected. From the seizure of domains names by the US Government to ICANN's removal of restrictions on Registry/Registrar cross-ownership, 2010 was a year full of surprises. In this post, I've compiled what I think were the biggest domain name stories in 2010. more
Yesterday I participated in a panel at the International Consumer Product Safety Conference sponsored by the International Consumer Product Health and Safety Organization (ICPHSO) held at the European Commission in Brussels Belgium. This conference brings together the global community of product safety engineers, manufacturers, retailers, regulators, inspectors, and counterfeiting investigators. The role of online fraud and illicit product traffic is clearly one of the conference priorities. more
A domain name consists of two main elements: the second-level domain name to the left of the dot - often consisting of a brand name or relevant keywords - and the domain extension or top-level domain (TLD) to the right of the dot. Domain names form the key elements of the readable web addresses allowing users to access pages on the internet and also allowing the construction of email addresses. more
To say that it's been quite a year in the world of domain names would be an understatement. From compromised country code Top-Level Domains (ccTLD) registries, to the delay of new generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs), some of the events of the past year have been surprising, while others could easily have been predicted. Regardless of whether you could have seen these coming, please find below my list of 2009's most important domain name events...at least, as I see them. more
Minds + Machines reports: "A quantitative analysis of UDRP data for all open generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs) concludes that the introduction of new gTLDs will result in approximately 316 new cases of cybersquatting, and that the resultant cost to trademark holders, overall, will be $870,000 per year -- less than less than $.10 for each trademark registered worldwide, or about $.44 per trademark registered in the United States. The data show that cybersquatting correlates to registration volume across all open gTLDs, not to the number of gTLDs, but is more prevalent in .com." more
What's at the heart of cybersquatting may also be at the heart of free speech on the Internet: the diversion of Internet users looking for plaintiff's web site to defendant's web site. Cybersquatters register domain names to accomplish this, while meta-infringers (as we will call them) use HTML code and search engine optimization techniques. Meta-infringers do this by creating keyword density by using competitor's trademarks and permutations thereof in their website in order to rank higher in the search engine results when someone searches on the competitor's trademarks. more
This case involves an alleged domain name theft. Solid Host is a web host and initial owner of the domain name solidhost.com, which it registered through eNom in 2004. Solid Host claims that in 2008, a security breach at eNom allowed an unknown interloper (Doe) to steal the domain name and move the registration to NameCheap. Doe also acquired NameCheap's "WhoisGuard" service, a domain name proxy service that masked Doe's contact information in the Whois database. Solid Host contacted Doe and sought the domain name; Doe asked for $12,000, and Solid Host took a pass... more
My book, "The Current State of Domain Name Regulation: Domain Names as Second Class Citizens in a Mark-dominated World" is now available by Routledge. The following is an overview of the book. more
While typosquatting is not a new phenomenon, recent research highlights that it is being used to collect sensitive corporate information from employees and lure consumers to interact with dubious websites. ... Security consultancy Godai Group recently uncovered the use of a specific type of typosquat - a "doppelganger domain" - to collect sensitive enterprise information via email-based attacks. more
I want to call your attention to another court decision that upholds the right of a consumer to create a non-commercial web site criticizing a company, using the company's name as the domain name. Lucas Nursery and Landscaping v. Grosse, 2004 WL 403213 (6th Circuit March 5, 2004). This case involves Lucas Nursery, a landscaping company in the suburbs of Detroit, Michigan, which apparently botched work done for Michelle Gross - or at least that was her opinion. But, when she established a web site to tell her story, Lucas sued her under the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act ("ACPA")... more
Imagine a California non-profit corporation providing material assistance to a criminal wanting to do you physical and financial harm. Then, imagine that corporation is ICANN. Imagine no longer, because that is precisely what the ICANN Compliance department managed to pull off this week, in an all-too-common demonstration of the havoc they can cause by sheer ineptitude, without apology or concern. This is the situation which crossed my desk this week. more
A recent study took an in-depth look at the scale and the risk of domain name typosquatting -- the practice of registering mis-spellings of popular domain names in an attempt to profit from typing mistakes. "Applying every possible one-character typo to the domain names of Facebook, Google, Twitter, Microsoft, Apple and Sophos," Paul Ducklin, Sophos' Asia Pacific head of technology collected HTTP data and browser screenshots from 1502 web sites and 14,495 URLs. In this report, Ducklin analyses the data revealing unexpected results within the typosquatting ecosystem. more
The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) leads the charge to combat child sexual abuse material (CSAM) online, and we at Public Interest Registry (PIR) are dedicated to supporting their efforts. We are honored to work with them across two important programs: Domain Alerts and TLD Hopping List. IWF services have been extremely successful in addressing CSAM on .ORG over the past five years more
This past week I had two items pop up on my alerts. The first was about Facebook suing domain registrar Namecheap for allowing domains that impersonate the social media company and can be used for scams. The second was a plea by the Electronic Frontier Foundation to join in its crusade to stop the sale of the .ORG domain. It took me a moment to realize these are linked. more