Around the Net

Typosquatting: Big Business, but is it Legal?

There's a different sort of housing bubble on the Web taking place in the domain name business-the territory of companies like GoDaddy.com. That sector is being propped up by the propagation of a new kind of "cybersquatting," which many regard as a questionable business practice. Cybersquatters register Internet domains containing trademarks, and then seek out the owner offering it up at an inflated price. The variation in question here is called typosquatting, which refers to buying commonly misspelled domain names--or domains you might think exist--and then filling the page up with links and/or ads from Google or Yahoo. Forbes uses Shows.com as an example of a domain you'd think might belong to a seller of Broadway show tickets that really brings you to a site full of links and ads. Houston-based Internet REIT owns the site, one of 400,000 Web addresses. This is legal, and apparently it's lucrative: Susquehanna Financial Group estimates that typosquatting could be a $1 billion business by next year. Forbes conducts a Q&A with the company's CEO.

Read the whole story at Forbes.com »

Next story loading loading..