John, This is also being discussed on the NANOG list under the thread "Hey, SiteFinder is back, again..." as it is of operational interest to network operators. I'll summarize if there is interest. Eric John Berryhill wrote:
Not strictly domain related, but quite ironic in view of the manner in which certain folks have advocated various positions in the ICANN community.
One may recall from the Marrakech meeting, Verizon's attorney talking about the "dark side" of monetizing trade or service marks of others:
"SARAH DEUTSCH: Yes. Although there is nothing long with a little healthy monetization, I am going to talk today sharing I think Roberto's and other's concerns about the dark side of monetization. And this unfortunately has nothing to do with lip balm or photography, but does have to do with the exploitation of trademark that victimizes consumers and businesses and the goodwill of the trademarks. And most of the problems are actually arising from the practices of domain name parking."
Well, surprise, surprise... Verizon has provided a new "service" to its fiber optic (FIOS) internet service.
When a Verizon Fios customer enters a non-existent domain name into their browser, instead of getting an error page, Verizon provides its own pay-per-click parking page of the type used by cybersquatters to make money from famous trademarks.
I have posted a sample screenshot at:
http://www.johnberryhill.com/pix/1.jpg
The screenshot shows the result, as seen by a Verizon ISP customer, of trying to reach i-want-sprint-cellphones.com
Now, some joker may come along and register that domain name, so to be clear, the screenshot was taken on November 5, 2008.
Verizon's parking page for i-want-sprint-cellphones.com serves up paid advertisements from Yahoo! from which Yahoo and Verizon share the revenue paid by the advertisers. The page is particularly notable in that all of the paid links are for providers of goods and services OTHER than Sprint, to whom there is no link whatsoever on the page.
To be clear - Verizon is mis-directing internet visitors clearly looking for services of one of their own competitors, by hi-jacking the DNS results provided to their own ISP customers.
The beauty of Verizon's position as one of the largest ISP's in the United States is that they can obtain the exact same result as the domain tasters, without ever having to register a domain name at all.
To Verizon, all typographic variants of everyone else's trademarks are now a money making proposition, now that Verizon is monetizing the entire unregistered domain name space.
This situation should clarify for many, the actual commercial motivation behind the positions that Verizon has advocated relative to domain parking and tasting. The larger the unregistered name space - the more money Verizon makes.
John Berryhill, Ph.d., Esq. 4 West Front St. Media, PA 19063 (610) 565-5601 (267) 386-8115 fax