2008 Cybersquatting figures

With recent news about the sale of the domain Toys.com to ToysRus for $5.1million making headline news the world over last week, a refreshing perspective was offered on the domain industry, showing the legitimate money to be made by serious investors in generic domains, without any mention of the “darker” side of the industry so often deemed more newsworthy.

The cybersquatting underside of domain investment was, however, dragged back centre stage today as new figures were released, showing 2008 had the highest instance of cybersquatting complaints ever recorded - 2,329 cases in total, an 8% increase on 2007’s figures.

I would love to know figures for reverse domain hijacking, (where a company aggresively pursues domains with only a tenuous link to their intellectual property rights, in an effort to obtain a valuable asset for free) as I’ll wager the figures on that front have jumped even more than 8%. Many large corporations abuse their power and attempt to extort generic domains from their rightful owner by means of a wipo, yet very little media attention is given to this phenomenon.

Public awareness of typos and cybersquatting is getting more pronounced, even resulting in mainstream advertisements mocking the phenomenon in the UK:-

Godaddy Announce sales of Indian domain extensions

Well, with recent news announced that Godaddy will now be offering the .in extension, as well as 3rd tier extensions like .co.in, which are all the country level codes of India, all I can say is I am amazed it has taken this long! Bob Parsons is rarely one to hang about when there is money to be made by flogging just about any old donkey extension, as can be seen by the recent over enthusiastic promotion of .me, so I am surprised that one with more credibility than 90% of the new extensions has taken so long to be offered by the world’s most popular registrar…

I am, and have always been a big believer in the .in extension. Coming from the UK, it is easy to see the way a well marketed country code can become the accepted norm, even over .com in many cases. The .co.uk extension is a huge success, and I firmly believe that as the itnernet becomes more and more widely available in India, the value of good names in the Indian extensions will rise.

The news that Godaddy will be promoting and selling .in and its counterparts is great news for the extension as a whole, and anybody with a vested interest in its success. Needless to say, I will soon showcase some of my own indain names here at Accurate Name.