Typosquatting

More on new gTLDs

Further to yesterday’s post, ICANN has released:

  • v4 of the draft Applicant’s Guidebook; and
  • an Economic Framework for the Analysis of the Expansion of Generic Top-level Domain Names;
  • and two “snapshots”.

The materials are open for public comment until 21 July.

Lid dip: Marty

The Economic Framework and snapshots can be downloaded via here.

Try not to be cynical: this is about giving people who missed out on registering their domain name in .com (or wherever) a chance to get their preferred domain name; it is not about creating ways for registrars to generate more fees or …

According to the Economic Framework document, there would be a US$185,000 starting fee for a new gTLD.

It identified:

The potential benefits of new gTLDs to Internet users are that they may provide competition to existing gTLDs, add differentiation and new products that are valuable to consumers, and/or relieve congestion problems caused by having only a few gTLDs.

Notwithstanding 2 waves of new gTLDs, 73% of domain names registered in “open” gTLDs are still registered in .com (which accounts for only 6.3% of all domain names). “Only” 52% of survey respondents who registered their domain name in .biz, for example, had registered the domain “for defensive purposes”, i.e., to stop someone else registering it. So much for competition and reducing congestion. How many people can register “coca-cola” anyway?

Apparently, one fifth of survey respondents who registered in .biz or .info or .name had not previously registered a domain name and 55% claimed to have registered a different domain name to names registered in a pre-existing gTLD. However, looking at duplicate domain names registered in more than 1 open gTLD:

a high percentage of domain names registered on .info were also registered on .com (89 percent), .net (81 percent), and .org (75 percent), and a high percentage of domain names registered on .biz were also registered on .com (85 percent).

but:

only 11 percent of the overlapping .info and .com names were registered to the same owner. For .biz and .com overlap, the percentage registered to the same owner was higher, 42 percent.

A different study by Zittrain and Edelman based on a sample of 823 names registered in both .biz and .com estimated about 20-30% were registered to the same person.

About half of the registrations in .info and .biz were inactive, while 15% simply redirected to another website.

New gTLDs might reduce search costs, perhaps, on the theory that you would only have to go to the .canon gTLD to find information about Canon’s products. Would Canon give up canon.com? Who searches that way anyway? Only 90% of survey respondents reported using a search engine to find things on the Internet – so for those users of search engines, new gTLDs are “less likely” to reduce search costs. How long does it take to get a search result from Google or Bing! or Yahoo (may be a problem with exclamation marks here)?

On the negative side, the Economic Framework reports an estimate of legal costs for UDRP proceedings in the order of US$1.58 million which “suggests that the external costs associated with cyber-squatting in new gTLDs would be low”, although the study does acknowledge that there would be an increase in costs having regard to steps taken outside the UDRP.

The Framework also reports on a fascinating study about “typosquatting”. Apparently, about 80% of the sample misspelt domain names resolved to pay-per-click advertising sites.

“Industry sources” reported to ICANN that it costs a company between US$6,000 and %15,000 p.a. to monitor each trade mark that is being protected. [What monitoring activities are your clients spending that money on?]

There is lots more fascinating detail in the Economic Framework document in particular.

More on new gTLDs Read More »

A scientific approach to typosquatting

Typosquatting can occur when someone registers a misspelling of your domain name in the hope that your customers will mistype the domain name in their web browser and land on that someone’s website. (Apparently, a significant portion of people who do so then click on a link on the typosquatted website, thus generating pay per click advertising revenues for the site ‘squatter’.)

Apart from the potential diversion of custom, FairWinds Partners also makes the point that typosquatting can harm the reputation of the brand.  As an example they speculate about the impact on Disney’s customers if they landed on a typosquatted page promoting pornography.

Recognising that it is not feasible to register every possible variation of your domain name to defend against such practices, FairWinds Partners have published a attempt to analyse typosquatting scientifically.

The study looked at 3,000 top level domains that had more than 2,000,000 hits per month.  From this universe, they found that most typosquatting appears to fall into 1 of 10 categories.  They also concluded that the typosquatters were targetting domain names fairly scientifically.

Apart from typosquatting, FairWinds Partners notes that consideration should be given to registering the domain name in other tlds –  e.g. consider .biz and .net, not just .com; also consider country specific domains. This, however, is already problematic – there are already 21 gTLDS, not to mention of the country specific ccTLDS such as .com.au and .co.uk etc.  And its going to get much worse with ICANN, in the interests of competition and diversity no less, planning to allow a potentially unlimited number of tlds.

Download the paper here (pdf).

Other research suggests that about 10% of internet searches don’t land on their expected destination (Lid dip Marty).

A scientific approach to typosquatting Read More »