I was reading a post on one of my favorite sports blogs, The Pensblog, and I came across this post: Sad State of Affairs. This post brings the issue of "Cyber Squatting" to the forefront. For those readers out there who are unfamiliar with the issue, I will provide a brief synopsis. Basically, cyber squatters are people who try to cash in on a web site's popularity by buying domain names that are very similar to that very popular website. For example, when I type in penguins.com, I don't get linked to the Pittsburgh Penguins' homepage, I get a cyber squatter's page. The site has very little to do with penguins (aside from the picture of a few emperor penguins on the front page). It is littered with sponsored ads that are intended to make the web site operator money. This has force many popular web site operators to spend hundreds of dollars buying domain names that are close to theirs in an effort to automatically link to the intended site.
The most classic example of cybersquatting probably occurred with the whitehouse.com/.gov scandal. Whitehouse.com was actually a porn site that was not affiliated with the government. Many people, including young children, were directed to this site when they were looking to find out more about the president or the most famous residence in the country. The website they were looking for was whitehouse.gov. However, since a cybersquatter or opportunistic indivicual (choose your own characterizaton) purchased the .com, millions of people were directed to a site that they did not intend to see.
More to come on cybersquatting. . .
B.K.
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