Cameroon Typo-Squats all of .com

wayne writes "As reported on CircleID, the nation of Cameroon, which controls the .cm top level domain, has typo-squatted all of the .com domain space. They have placed a wildcard DNS record to redirect all traffic to an ad-based search page. Unlike the earlier case of Verisign putting a wildcard in the real .com domain, ICANN has very little direct control over what a nation can do with their own TLD. Will the owners of .co and .om follow?"

Comments

correct solution (that will never fly)...

[smash]

From some dude's blog that was linked to TFA:

The lesson here is that something is fundamentally screwed up in the domain world when one server manager in Cameroon can enable this much confusion. But I still can't figure out what the right solution is.

(from here: http://weblog.johnlevine.com/ICANN/cameroon.html?s eemore=y)

... is to require that US based sites use a US-specific country suffix, just like the rest of the internet.

I.e., migrate all of .com, .net, etc to .com.us, .net.us (or whatever).

That way, typoing the .com or .net suffix won't take you to a different country unintentionally :D

Sure, the internet was originally created in the US, but it's bigger than that now, and having one country that just doesn't use country suffixes is non-standard. :)

Of course, typo-ing the country suffix will still either not work, or take you to a different country, but what can you do...

As a side-effect, this would no doubt deter other country's businesses etc from simply registering .com, .org or .net domains because the domain rego is cheaper and it's "country-ambiguous"... (yes, I own .net and .org domains and i'm in australia. if it was going to have to be .com.us or whateever, I probably wouldn't be using up your precious US namespace :D)