VeriSign Looks At Earning Money on Domain Typos

Harald Paulsen writes "In a recent article Computer Business Review uncovers how VeriSign Inc is testing a service that would return a webpage if a user mistypes an URL. Basically all nonexistant domain queries could return an IP address and if the user was trying to access a page with a webbrowser they could get redirected to a search-engine, or worse: a page asking them to buy a domain. This is most certainly breaking the DNS standard and could be compared to cybersquatting (Hey Ford, want to have a banner ad whenever someone mistypes Toyota?). This is interesting in relation to an earlier story about register.com and holding-pages."

Comments

You can't cybersquat....

[Anonymous Coward]

...when there is nothing to cybersquat on. One must actually buy and have an actual domain registered and functional for cybersquatting to occur.

Infinite Domains == Infinite Spam

[udoschuermann]

BUY OUR SOFTWARE TO GENERATE 9x10^9999999 TOTALLY FUCKING UNIQUE EMAIL ADDRESSES ON INFINITE NUMBERS OF DOMAINS AND MAKE MILLIONS OF DOLLARS FROM PEOPLE WHO WANT THEIR PENIS ENLARGED. ONLY $99 IF YOU CALL NOW: 1-905-555-1212...........

(groan)

They do realize that any of those domains MUST have a postmaster@... address, yes? Someone's gonna have a field day with that!

Re:Statistics on mistyping of "slashdot "

[theedge318]

Think about it is two sites were to pay for this "service"

say: sLashdot.org and sMashdot.org

Then you get someone with engRish, who types sRashdot.org

How do you determine who should get the pointer? You can't both are perfectly valid versions. The only way to resolve this would be to pay for each individual misspelling that they want ... WAIT ... why don't they just *register* the domain.

This is why you should get the DNS error, and then the user can go to their favorite search engine, and try there ... OR have their web browser do it for them automatically.