Guarding your online brand against cybersquatters

If you had a business called Widgets R Us and somebody set up shop right next door with a business called Widgets R U, you’d probably be a bit miffed. Especially if the interloper then demanded money to move elsewhere. cybersquatters: But this sort of thing is happening all the time online. It’s called cybersquatting – buying up website addresses, or domain names, that sound very similar to existing well-known brand names. When Google recently launched its new parent company Alphabet, and the abc.xyz web address, there were more than…

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Google’s Domain Name Land Grab: Consumer Convenience Or Coercive Control Point?

Privacy

Internet naming decisions are the sort of Internet plumbing inside baseball that only interests policy wonks and marketing mavens. That is until an 800 pound gorilla like Google GOOGL +0.54% decides to pay $25 million for a single generic top-level domain name (gTLD). Buying “.app” for almost four-times the previous record for a gTLD not only raised eyebrows, but questions about the strategy behind Google’s expansive and expensive domain name land grab. Although the most costly, .app is merely one of over 100 gTLDs, Google had already spent nearly $20…

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ICANN and Your Internet Abuse

In spite of the material we were presented with in Durban something has gone very wrong inside of ICANN Compliance. KnujOn has published a report which demonstrates that ICANN Compliance appears to completely collapse between September 2012 and December 2012. Following December 2012, ICANN seems to stop responding to or processing any complaints. It is around this time certain compliance employees start disappearing. This was not limited to the Sydney office as some would have us believe, all while we have been given assurances the compliance team was being ramped…

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