Domain Search Squatters Must Die episode #001
It looks like the
SpinServer
people that I mentioned nigh on nine months ago have disappeared.
That I can cope with - a pity, because I liked their designs, but
businesses come and go.
What INFURIATES me beyond measure is the way the people who run the domain registers then cash in on any businesses' past success by installing a copy-cat templated redirector site that earns them a bit of money from the hapless people who mistake it for the real thing. They're getting good too: it was so well layed out it took me several moments to work out that there was nothing actually useful on the site. Previous attempts I've seen have been pretty much just a bunch of prepackaged searches on the keywords in your previous site listed down the page, with a generic picture of a woman holding a mouse or going windsurfing (or for the more extreme sites going windsurfing holding a mouse). Now it's getting nasty.
It's not good enough that these domain registrars take money for
something they've been proven to
lose,
'mistakenly' swap to another person, revoke without the slightest
authority, fraudulently bill for,
and costs them
nothing to generate. They they have to leech off the popularity of
any site that goes under, not only scamming a few quick thousand bucks
in the process but confusing anyone who wanted just a simple page
saying "this company is no longer doing business". There must be
something preventing this from happening in real life - businesses
registering the name of a competitor as soon as they'd closed, buying
up the office space and setting up a new branch. Except that there'd
be some dodgy marketing exec handing them money for every person who
wandered in and asked "Is this where I get my car repaired?". This
sounds criminal to me.
posted at: 07:53 | path: /tech/web | permanent link to this entry
All posts licensed under the CC-BY-NC license. Author Paul Wayper.