Verisign planning to capture non-domain mistypes

[AdoptableDomains]

Verisign planning to capture trash hits
According to today's Wall Street Journal, Verisign has another trick up it's sleeve. The report says they plan to capture misstyped .com and .net internet addresses (so called trash traffic) for their own use, possibly to an ad based search engine or web sites it chooses or sells the traffic to. The plan would be to alter the DNS so that standard error screens are not shown, but non-existent domain traffic goes where they want it to EVEN WHEN A DOMAIN DOESN'T EXIST.

It seems to me this doesn't stop mistyped real and registere domains from being sold to capture that traffice, but it would seemingly put them in the position of "pseudo typo squatting" by using mistypes for their own benefit which may not be to the benefit of trademark owners.

The report also indiates Neustar has already done testing along this line sending users to LookSmart via a company called paxfire (a traffic broker), and that aol already captures mistypes in their version of browsers to either offer suggestions or capture the traffic. Many will remember when this happened several months ago confusing lots of users.

This seems to be another blurring domain names so that you may not even know when you've typed a bad address at some point. On the other hand it may be a ploy to get companies to purchase all possible mis-types who now don't care if an error message comes up, but may if the traffic was actually redirected to competitiors.

They recently tried to trump the domain drop catchers with the WLS, now it looks like they'll try to trump the brower makers from capturing mistypes.

 

[RJ]

Oh man, this is bad news.

Example, if you were trying to reach NamePros.com and types in NamePras.com, insted of getting a server not found error you end up at whatever site Verisign wants to send you to.

I was appalled when Neustar tried this with .us domains several months ago. It can be very confusing to new users who could have no idea they typo'd. Even worse, some of the Neustar ads were for competing products and porn.

This is typosqatting to the worst because the trademark holders can't even file a UDRP case to stop it.

 

[Coastalguy]

Typosquatting...what will they think of next.

ST

 

[kohashi]

Oh yay. If it earns good traffic then we can register the domains and steal them from under their noses...

 

[AdoptableDomains]

Originally posted by kohashi
Oh yay. If it earns good traffic then we can register the domains and steal them from under their noses...

If it's not a real domain, you can't track traffic to it. only they can. I seriously doubt they would make any traffic figures known just for this reason.

 

[jj2ii3344]

This is very sad. It seems to be the law should be targetted at verisign instead of putting full force into microsoft.

 

[painperdu]

Thanks again, ICANN!

 

[DuffMan]

This is sad. Talk about a monopoly.

 

[Kodeking]

I dont wanna type ilegit.com and be redirected to porn ads! what will little kids think if they typoed my games site!

 

[Moon]

http://www.microwsoft.com

/f*** sake its taken as well.

 

[HotKey]

Old thread.. but typosquatting. Thankfully looks like it never came to fruition. The logistics seem painful, basically any unregistered domain typed into the url would have to have some sort of wildcard dns behind it. How does that happen without the domain being registered?

Do we have something like this happening today? I seem to recall some unregistered ccTLDs going to a static registry page, dot-io and dot-ws maybe.

A positive thing is it could clear up confusion on the typo, a negative is it could add confusion.. lol.