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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New gTLDs: does your business know a thing about new domain names

New generic top-level domains are set to shake-up the way businesses pick names for their websites. We explain how they work The starting gun has been fired on the biggest land grab in the history of the web. Beginning today, thousands of new generic top-level domains (gTLDs) will be unleashed, giving businesses the opportunity to be more creative with their website addresses. No longer will businesses be restricted to .co.uk, .com or the slightly more esoteric likes of .net or .tv. Instead, they’ll be able to put their brand name…

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Is .com the 212 area code of domains? Experts say alternative suffixes are for cyber-squatters

The World Wide Web is getting wider with the addition of new top-level domains this year, but experts say businesses and marketers may find that grabbing new options won’t do much good. The .com ending for Internet addresses still rules. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, known as Icann, the nonprofit that oversees domain-name systems, plans to introduce more extensions in mid-2013. source

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