Dell Suit Reveals Lucrative Domain Name Trade

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday February 5, 2008 @08:29AM from the pennies-times-millions dept.

alphadogg writes "A civil suit filed in Florida by Dell and its Alienware subsidiary is giving insight into the enormous sums of money that can be made by creating Web pages full of advertising links. In October, Dell sued a group of domain registrars, alleging the companies bought more than 1,100 domain names with trademark-infringing characteristics, such as 'dellbatterrogram.com' in order to put advertising links on the pages. The practice, known as typosquatting, is illegal. Dell alleges that the group of defendants, mostly registered offshore, control over a million domain names and have used over 64 million." The article also mentions Google's love-hate relationship with such shady advertising practices.

2 of 147 comments (clear)

Re:Ironic? by misleb · 2008-02-05 08:48 · Score: 5, Informative

Yes, I think it is pretty ironic that the very article the summary is linked to is infested with crappy ads.

Really? I found that nearly all internet advertising disappears somewhere around the time AdBlock Plus we released. My theory is that...

*disables adblock*

OMG, WTF? People are still looking at that kind of crap on a daily basis?

The only non-crappy ad is a blocked ad.

-matthew

--
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
Re:Nitpicking by insanecarbonbasedlif · 2008-02-05 08:57 · Score: 5, Interesting

3. There should be an ICANN website where you veto typosquatters - that is, the squatter sites would be removed from the TLD as soon as they get enough votes. How many votes does the botnet have to place before a targeted site is dropped?

--
Just because I doubt myself does not mean I find your position compelling.