Digital Ethics Book Project Reflection Format
 

What’s Not In A Name: The Ethics of Cybersquatting

John D. Thomas

Thursday, August 16th, 2012

http://digitalethics.org/essays/ethicsofcybersquatting/

Cybersquatting

First Impression:

I think it has something to do with cyber squatting.

Quote:

"A huge 86% of the possible one letter misspellings of the Apple homepage led to typosquatting sites."

Reflection Proper:

Domain is one important factor for a business. According to some online articles, Facebook bought fb.com for 8.5 million dollars. Having a good domain is necessary but not everyone has a perfect typing skill, people do make mistakes and sometimes people are just lazy into typing the whole thing just like what Facebook saw, people are tired of writing the whole 8 letter domain and just bought a 2 letter domain so one can type faster. Just recent, Facebook bought messenger.com as a shortcut to their Messaging app that is still part of Facebook but has its own domain. Here lies the problem of typing errors. Sometimes people make mistakes and according to the article, just one letter wrong will lead you to a different website and some people purposely buy these websites. Some have no real harm to consumers because it will not load, some actually copy the whole page and make it look like the real page but is already tracking you or if it is an e-commerce website, the website maybe stealing your information already. This is a problem that many companies like to address, Google is pushing their SSL on all websites, this proves one that there is no snooping between one and the website, so no third party can change or add information to you but it does not help typo users. I think the government here in the Philippines has to copy the United States' Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act so there will be protection for companies here.

5 Things That I've learned:

Cybersquatting exists.

Typosquatting exists.

US has an Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act.

Public Interest Registry controls the .org.

Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers controls TLDs.

5 Integrative Questions:

What is cbyersquatting?

What is typosquatting?

How can one track the one who cbyerquats or typosquats?

How can these organizations keep one from cbyerquatting or typosquatting?

How can the government protect businesses from cbyersquatting or typosquatting?