[dns-operations] charter, sitefinder, opendns (slashdot today)

[Florian Weimer]

* Paul Vixie:

> because yahoo and google are successful commercial entities, we can
> presume that the absence of wildcards under yahoo.com and google.com
> mean that monetizable typo's aren't occuring there, or are always
> retried with correct names so no opportunity is lost by not having a
> wildcard.

I would rather look for typos in the vicinity of GOOGLE.COM and
YAHOO.COM. (But Google and Yahoo are a bad indicator here because
their text advertising indirectly channels money into several
sitefinder-like operations, some of them using mass domain
registrations.  Yuck.  The incentives for regular brand owners may be
different.)

Anyway, I think that the answer to the sitefinder mess has to do with
the question of who pays for the ads.  Do you really want to pay for
ads that are displayed when someone mistypes your domain name?  The
value of this advertising is quite low, I think, because it's an
almost guaranteed visit anyway.  Without the ad (= typosquatting
registration), the customer would notice their mistake and just
correct it.