Undesirable
Consequences of Empirical Studies on Cybersquatting
Alex
Tajirian
August 21, 2010
Empirical studies on cyber- and typosquatting
(for example, Moore and Edelman’s “Measuring the
Perpetrators and Funds of Typosquatting”) may inadvertently
encourage bad behavior. People tend to do what most other people
are doing, even when the given act is presented to them as something
wrong. (See, for example, Professor Robert Cialdini’s
“Crafting Normative
Messages to Protect the Environment.”) Yes, attempts to use
negative social proof against cybersquatting should still underline
how much harm the practice causes overall. But, when possible, they
should focus the audience’s attention on the act of a few rotten
apples, not the entire community.
Carrot-and-stick strategies can be effective
in fighting cybersquatting. For example, domain parking service
providers can display a seal of approval on parking pages whose
registrants don’t own rogue (i.e., brand-infringing) domains. The
seal creates trust in the minds of visitors and thus generates additional
profits to domain owners; that, in turn, increases parking companies’
commissions. Moreover, the
seal, combined with the parking company’s logo, would indirectly
increase the value of the parking company’s other services. Skeptics
may say that a given domainer could conceal infringing domains by
splitting his or her portfolio among more than one parking company.
That’s possible in the short term, but profits from parking such
domain names would dwindle, especially in the face of the quality-driven
measures that search engines are likely to take against rogue domains.
Although the carrot-and-stick mechanism has a first mover advantage,
the stick available to parking companies (that is, rejecting rogue
domain owners) won’t be credible unless domain owners are made to
realize the damage stemming from bad behavior. Otherwise, domain
owners will block out the threat. (I have also proposed the carrot-and-stick
mechanism in the context of a cooperative
regime between brand and domain owners.)
Connect &
Share
|