Domain name squatting, piracy [UPDATE]
Update: I wasn’t making this stuff up! Dennis Forbes in his post “Interesting Facts About Domain Names” illustrates my point perfectly with cold hard researched numbers!
Shopping for domain names has become such a pain in the rear. It’s no wonder that the majority of new (Web 2.0) sites out there have nonsensical names like “bootoo” and “yinko”.
It seems that any real world word or word combination has already been registered and “reserved” by some nameless, faceless company who has decided to post advertising on its temporary “under construction” page until it’s site is launched.
This is of course a scam. Those sites will never be launched, and will forever contain advertising. I know this for a few reasons. One of which was a job interview I went to where the “project manager” openly told me that he was responsible for thousands of domain names on which they posted their advertising for their “products”. Suffice it to say, as the conversation went on I felt a sickly feeling in my stomach and walked from that scam–err job opportunity.
I’ve also read/heard that domain registrars will go ahead and reserve choice domain names that are searched for through their lookup services. Is this true? Though I try to avoid conspiracy theories, I wonder if this rumour isn’t true.
All this to say that we need legislation that denies these people from reserving domain names for the sole purpose of running their scams. If a viable website isn’t launched within a set period of time, the domain name needs to be revoked.
Also, people, please! Don’t click the links that are on those pages. Every time you do, you urge these people on! That’s also the reason spam exists. Because about 2% of the people who get them ACTUALLY RESPOND!
’nuff said. Rant over.
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One Comment
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March 31st, 2006 at 12:45 pm
I had my domain hijacked after renewal problem with my registrar… 5 seconds after the expiration; one of those faceless companies stole it and put their damn advertising on it. There is a wait period of 30 days to prevent this, but my registrar was dead silent and didn’t answer my support calls. Since then, because this domain was my own name, this company has received all my mail and owned the primary email address I used for all my online accounts. Remember… those people are scammers… scary! After a couples of months and countless hours of digging to find who was behind this and how I could register a complaint, I was left with only two solution… either pay the 500$ ransom, or drive down to New-Orleans and beat the bejeeses out of two monumental jerks who spend their life doing this. But I didn’t have a driving license. So I tried to forget about it and registered a new domain. There is no other solutions… all the official organizations supposed to resolve those issues are understaffed and only care if a lawsuit is launched by Nike or the likes. So I prayed something really, really, really bad would happen to them… but I never taught good old god would answer my prayers on such a scale!