How about a company that openly claims "ten thousand of our registered domains represent the family surnames of 70% of the population of the United States and Canada" Granted, their stated purpose: "This allows the company to offer over 200 million people a personal presence on the Internet - based solely on their surname." can be viewed as beneficial to the user community at large.
However, fundamentally this company is squatting on 10,000 potential domain names covering not just family surnames but many topics including animals, sports, people, places, etc.
My understanding of the cyber-squatting laws (and please by all means somebody second this and/or correct me if I am wrong) is that it is illegal to "appropriate registered trademarks for use as Internet domain names with an intention to try to sell them to the trademark owner."
Would it be a bad thing to extend the definition of cyber-squatting to include all domain names that another user has a legitimate claim to? I think this could potentially be a good thing.
I will put forth that there a distinction between purchasing domain names thus forcing people to use your company to "service" that domain name and offering services to domain name holders. The latter is closer to the ideal of an open market model: the user has the choice and (hopefully) chooses the supplier of services that s/he deems best. The former is a model in which the rich get richer and the poor pay all of the bills.
Slashdot Mirror
How about a company that openly claims "ten thousand of our registered domains represent the family surnames of 70% of the population of the United States and Canada" Granted, their stated purpose: "This allows the company to offer over 200 million people a personal presence on the Internet - based solely on their surname." can be viewed as beneficial to the user community at large.
However, fundamentally this company is squatting on 10,000 potential domain names covering not just family surnames but many topics including animals, sports, people, places, etc.
My understanding of the cyber-squatting laws (and please by all means somebody second this and/or correct me if I am wrong) is that it is illegal to "appropriate registered trademarks for use as Internet domain names with an intention
to try to sell them to the trademark owner."
Would it be a bad thing to extend the definition of cyber-squatting to include all domain names that another user has a legitimate claim to? I think this could potentially be a good thing.
I will put forth that there a distinction between purchasing domain names thus forcing people to use your company to "service" that domain name and offering services to domain name holders. The latter is closer to the ideal of an open market model: the user has the choice and (hopefully) chooses the supplier of services that s/he deems best. The former is a model in which the rich get richer and the poor pay all of the bills.