Benjamin Edelman [1], who teaches marketing in the Harvard School of Business, has initiated a class action against Google on behalf of trademark owners whose marks have been infringed by typosquatters. (See the story on Arstechnica [2].) Typosquatting [3] is the practice of registering domain names that approximate the names of real companies’ websites in the hope of obtaining advantage from internet users who arrive there by mistyping (e.g. http://goggle.com/). Edelman claims that Google places ads on these fraudulent sites and benefits from revenue generated when a user clicks into the sites by mistake. Given the number of such pseudo-sites, Edelman estimates that Google makes tens of millions of dollars each year from these ads.
Readers interested in learning more about this sort of cyber-squatting might consult the Coalition Against Domain Name Abuse [4], or CADNA (bet you thought of CANADA).