"Every month fifty million domains appear, sit parked for 4.99 days, then disappear."
I agree that this is a stability issue.

"Speculators have
argued that all these squats provide a service: they usually have a paid
link to the domain the user actually wanted, and if you land on the squat,
you or your search engine must have made a mistake which they are helping
you rectify for a small fee."
I disagree that this argument is absurd.  They are helping you correct your typing mistakes, and the fee is not charged to you, but if it is a paid link, paid by the advertiser, which the owner gets a very small portion.  The more popular the site, the more spelling mistakes will occur.

The webmasters should be the ones to advise the site owner on domain resolvability issues.  I don't know how many times I've advised people to get all possible misspellings, and multiple extensions.  Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't.  But at that point it's a fair game.

-Randy Glass
A@L


On 6/10/07, John L <johnl@iecc.com> wrote:
> Is it a question of stability, or just someone doing something we don't like
> to see?

I certainly consider it to be a stability issue.  Every month fifty
million domains appear, sit parked for 4.99 days, then disappear.  Most of
them are typosquats, misspelling of established domains.  Speculators have
argued that all these squats provide a service: they usually have a paid
link to the domain the user actually wanted, and if you land on the squat,
you or your search engine must have made a mistake which they are helping
you rectify for a small fee.

I find this argument absurd.  If I want my spelling corrected (which I do,
being a lousy typist), I want to use a corrector of my choice, triggered
off an NXDOMAIN response in my browser, not some random speculator.  And,
of course, the squats are of no help fixing typos in mail and all the
other Internet services other than the web.

Regards,
John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://www.johnlevine.com, ex-Mayor
"More Wiener schnitzel, please", said Tom, revealingly.



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