Fight Back Against Cybersquatters

The story you are about to read is true. The names have been changed to protect the pond scum who hijacked the name of a not-for-profit animal rescue group. Not that they deserve protection.

Q&A: Cybersquatters bank on 'a good typo'

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The story you are about to read is true. The names have been changed to protect the pond scum who hijacked the name of a not-for-profit animal rescue group. Not that they deserve protection.

Q&A: Cybersquatters bank on 'a good typo'

This morning, I was at a meeting of a group I'll call Pet Rescue of Carbona, a fictitious name chosen for this example. This is a perpetually struggling group that saves of the lives of cats and dogs near where I live. We were discussing what to do about a bank balance hovering in the $500 range.

The group is redoing its Web site, and I asked whether I'd find it at petrescueofcarbona.org, the logical name for such a group. "No," I was told, "we have dot u-s for our domain." (Disclaimer: I am not an officer or spokesperson for the group).

I went home and checked to see whether I could register the .org version of the name. The domain reg system at my hosting company, 1&1, told me it was taken. I guessed that there most be another group with the same name as ours that got the domain first.

Running a WHOIS on the domain failed to turn up an owner for it, so I opened the browser and typed in the domain URL.

Up popped one of those "This domain for sale" pages that also included a bunch of paid links to various pet-released services. It looks as though these are Google AdSense placements, though I could be wrong. The page doesn't even have a listing for our actual site, a small courtesy that is too much to expect from cybersquatters.

Now, I am all for free enterprise and own a couple of hundred domain names, including a few .orgs (so people can't hijack traffic to the .com version of the same name). And, yes, I'd be happy to sell a few of them, all originally reserved for business ideas I toyed with.

But, holding onto a domain like "americanwarning.com" is far different than squatting on the domain of a real, not-for-profit that couldn't afford to ransom the domain if it wanted to.

Having been raised a good Methodist, I wrote an offered $100 for the domain--which I'd pay from my own pocket. I got back a note telling me to submit a "significantly higher" offer. I think I concluded my response with the words, "you scum."

These people have hijacked the good name of our organization and are holding it for ransom. I hope they are proud of making it just a little more difficult for 2007's "Community Organization of the Year" in our town to do its good works.

You think these people can sleep at night?

My understanding of what happened is that at some point in the past that the group owned the .org domain name, but a volunteer innocently let it lapse.

What usually happens here is the squatter looks for expiring domain names and grabs them, figuring the former owner will sooner or later be willing to pay good money to get it back.

Now, I'd have limited sympathy if Coca-Cola were to lose the "coke.com" domain name this way. Big companies are supposed to be able to protect their intellectual property.

But, here we have a tiny charity where a well-meaning volunteer (or two) screwed up because they didn't understand the nature of the people who populate some of the Internet's darker corners.

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