An invitation arrived yesterday to attend a Nominet briefing on dispute resolution for domain name registrars. It’s a breakfast job in London so I probably won’t go. With the invite came an interesting stat – one in every 3,000 .uk domains is subject to a dispute of some sort!
Considering that Nominet manages knocking on 10 million domains that’s a lorra (my wife’s from Liverpool) disputes. I imagine quite a number of these disputes relate to cybersquatters1 . I recently had occasion to look at some domains names to buy. There are a lot of domains out there that are owned but not used or simply point to sites that make money out of click through advertising.
These days the problem of finding a suitable domain is exacerbated by the fact that you also need to secure the corresponding Twitter name. I think it’s about time we started from scratch and changed the whole system. Bags I trefor.net 🙂
1 if you don’t know look it up.
3 replies on “Domain disputes and cybersquatting”
It makes me angry to see so many good domains wasted. For example, programming .com, .net, .co.uk, .eu and .co all seem to have squatters.
Recently I spend a couple of hours searching for a domain for a new product. Virtually every combination of the product name was registered by someone random and pointing to a holding page 🙁
First come first served in my book. If those squatters got there first and want to waste the registration costs every 2 years or so then so be it.
if you want the domain offer the owner something for it. I only own a few domains and none of them have public websites on them, but I do use the hosting and domains for emails and other things.
On the face of it my domains look like they are squatting but in fact they are in use.
However going back to first come first served I dont believe companies should be allowed to cyber squat for financial gain not in the masses anyway.
I’ve made sure that I secured the most common varients of my surname, so thats .co.uk, org.uk, .com and .net so that they didn’t end up being picked up by cybersquatters and as some friends of mine aren’t too tech savvy they sometimes substitute .co.uk for example when e-mailing me.
These are only used for mail forwarding.
I did think about putting up a site or blog but not really got anything riveting to say.