I'm getting caught up today on a huge backlog of blog reading. One thing I came across was this post by Maryam about her unfortunate run-in with typo-squatting, i.e. domains set up to catch traffic from people who mistype well-known and popular domain names.
Typo-squatting is a subset of a larger, increasingly common practice called "domain name parking" in which someone registers a domain name without a unique use in mind -- perhaps in the hope that someone will want to purchase it from them in the future for big money. Think of this as "homesteading on the Internet." In any case, rather than just have it sit around collecting dust, people try to monetize these domain registrations by "parking" them with a Web site hosting service that can serve up ads on the site and split with the domain owner any ad revenues. One more way to make a buck on the Internet, and there's nothing wrong with that.
Typo-squatting can be the less ethically pure side of the domain parking business, essentially the equivalent of buying up the real estate around the local McDonalds or Wal-Mart knowing that you'll get some slop-over traffic. One could argue that it's good business practice for a company to do this for their own site; it improves the user experience and gets people to where they wanted to go faster, with less frustration and wrong-turns. However, in some cases, if it's a third party doing the typo-squatting, it's potentially a trademark infirngement; Google recently went to court to force a third party to turn over ownership of several typo-squatting domain names to them for this very reason. And it certainly can pose ethical concerns, depending upon the content of the ads -- a great example being Maryam's case, where msityping "technorati.com" took her to a porn site.
We have a researcher in MSR, Yi-min Wang, whose team has spent the better part of the last year data mining the Internet for cybersecurity issues using a web crawler. He did some fascinating work over the summer looking for sites that were using browser vulnerabilities to install malware on users' machines -- and discovered that there was a well-organized ecosystem behind the practice.
Last week Yi-min released some results from his latest foray into this space: understanding typo-squatting. It turns out to be another well organized, and unpoliced, ecosystem, with two key players behind it: a Panamanian company that buys up the domain names, and a well-known US company that hosts them. Both are making a fair amount of money from this (right or wrong). Yi-Min's writeup gives lots of great data to pore over, and details his team's methodology. He even found a typo-squat of Disneyland's web-site that was serving up porn ads.
Now, it isn't the role of a research organization to pronounce judgment on any of these practices, and especially not to voice opinoins on their legality. What Yi-min is trying to do is to get good information out there, so that there can be a great, well-informed public debate. Ryan Naraine from eWeek looked at Yi-Min's work last week and began that conversation; hopefully others will pick it up and continue it, because this is a serious issue with huge consequences for the user experience -- and economics -- of the Internet. And we should hear all sides of the debate. Business on the Internet needs to be profitable. It also needs to be fair, ethical, consumer-friendly, and open. But this is all new territory, and needs to be discussed.
12:55:50 PM 
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