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    Verisign typo-squats | Log in/Create an Account | Top | 54 comments | Search Discussion
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    Re:What about telephone numbers
    by jberryhill on Tuesday September 16 2003, @04:22PM (#12221)
    User #3013 Info
    Comparing a paid-ranking search engine to a telephone directory service is pretty far off the mark here.

    When Neulevel ran its "experiment" with this a while back, a similar argument was made relative to "coca-cola":

    ------

    http://www.biglist.com/lists/lists.inta.org/tmtopi cs/archives/0305/msg00066.html

    > What if the service was one in which you typed in "www.cocacooa.biz" and it
    > returned a redirect page that said "Did you mean "www.cocacola.biz" and
    > allowed you to click on that to get to the real site. Wouldn't that be
    > better than getting a 404 error? Isn't that better for the user community
    > and trademark owners?

    The top sponsored result provided by your selected search engine, LookSmart,
    for "cocacola" is a scalper selling tickets to the NASCAR Coca-Cola 600 for
    approximately $300. It is most certainly not the Coca-Cola Bottling Company,
    unless they are not whom you meant by the "real site".

    -------

    Essentially, redirecting to a paid search engine permits "typosquatting on the cheap". Instead of registering a single typo of a trademark and setting up a website for it, all I have to do is submit a sufficiently high bid for the search term through Verisign's sole-source PPC engine and voila - I now have the top position for *every* typo domain on that trademark. What's particularly nice about this method is that I can limit the time and budget in such a way that the intermittent appearance of my bidded result (say, limited to 10,000 hits or one week, whichever comes first) allows me to reap the gain before any legal action can even be commenced.

    Your assumption about a "directory service" is somewhat naive.

    [ Reply to This | Parent ]
    Re:What about telephone numbers by jberryhill
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    Re:What about telephone numbers
    by dmehus on Tuesday September 16 2003, @10:10PM (#12226)
    User #3626 Info | http://doug.mehus.info/
    Naive or not, that's besides the point. They key to what Richard said is that thankfully, we receive a recorded "error message" when we dial a wrong number. The same should be for DNS. In a very crude, cave man (or cave bear [cavebear.com]) sort of way, it makes sense to compare DNS to a telephone system. When you type in a domain name, your browser crunches a few things very rapidly by processing your "call" for the number associated with a name to one of the thirteen geographically located root servers. Either operator A through M respond, and provide the correct number, and the user's request is processed. It's really quite simple, again, in a crude way. :)

    Cheers,
    DougDoug Mehus http://doug.mehus.info/ [mehus.info]
    [ Reply to This | Parent ]


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