Yahoo & Others Form Coalition Against Domain Name Abuse

Jul 25, 2007 at 9:12am ET by Barry Schwartz

Brand Owners on Web Offensive from Red Herring reports that Yahoo, Dell, Coca Cola, Hilton and others have joined together to fight cybersquatting. The companies formed a collation against cybersquatters named Coalition Against Domain Name Abuse.

Cybersquatters purchase domain names that are similar to trademark names, such as yahooemail.com and hilt0n.com. Some use that traffic to earn an affiliate commission on sales from the trademark owners, but others may use it for criminal activities, such as phishing for passwords, bank account details and other personal information.

CADNA President Josh Bourne said:

To effectively combat cybersquatting…and other Internet-based fraud, CADNA will work at the national and international levels to make these practices difficult to establish and unprofitable to maintain.

Postscript: Just spotted a Publishing 2.0 blog post that shows how he wanted to visit TechCrunch but accidently missed some letters and found typosquatters at Techrunch.com, Techcunch.com, and Tehccrunch.com. Nice timely example of cybersquatters in action.

Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.

See more articles by Barry Schwartz >

Share, Bookmark & Discuss This Article
More:

See more stories like this in the Members Library! Check out the Legal: Trademarks, Search Ads: Domaining, Yahoo: Legal sections of the Members Library where this story is filed. Members also get access to exclusive video content, a members-only weekly & monthly newsletter, plus more. Check out all the benefits!

FREE DAILY SEARCH NEWS RECAP!