Public DomainWritten by Kevin Sullivan
As a worker in domain industry, I was surprised by difference between this year and last in Super Bowl. No, I didn't necessarily care about teams involved, but I am an avid watcher of commercials every year, and took note of fact that it seemed about half of ads one year ago were for .com companies. This year, there were very few by comparison… Traffic. The Internet game is all about traffic. It's a simple equation- visitors = $$. Whether they are buying your products or driving up your ad revenues, visitors to your website are key to your success. There are, of course, many ways to increase traffic to your site. It would appear, though, that spending more than a million bucks on a 30-second commercial is not a cost-effective method, as many of those companies in 2000 Super Bowl discovered. One method that is cost-effective is not effectively utilized by many webmasters. Most webmasters I know have just one domain name for their site. As a simple rule, though, more ways there are to find you, more you will be found. Your company name, obviously, is a great place to start. I, like many other contemporary websurfers, am a "web-guesser". If I'm looking for The Widget Company, Inc., I'll type in "widgetcompany.com" and get their website more often than not. If webmaster for The Widget Company is smart, though, he'll also have "thewidgetcompany.com", "widgetcompanyinc.com" and "thewidgetcompanyinc.com" pointing to same site. Real-life example- Coca-Cola. Their official website is coke.com. They also own, however, cocacola.com, coca-cola.com, coca-colacompany.com and thecoca-colacompany.com, along with a whole host of others. One offshoot of company name is variants. Have you ever lamented state of
| | Domain Name Dispute ResolutionWritten by John MacKenzie
.COM companies are all rage with stock market riding high and falling as mood shifts. Everybody it appears is going on-line and there has been a massive rush to register all manner of domain names. In February 2000 there were over 200,000 .co.uk domains registered compared to just under 15,000 at same time last year and there were just under 9,500,000 .com domains registered by 1st March 2000! The domain name is seen as central to any marketing strategy as it is "sign post" to web site hopefully worth millions!However, due to simple fact that internet is global, there are not enough domain names to go round and problems arise when there are competing businesses with same name. To address this problem World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) through their Arbitration and Mediation Centre established a dispute resolution service to allow a cheap and effective means of resolving disputes without going to court. It follows Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) dispute resolution policy which deals with disputes concerning .com, .net, and .org domain names. The ICANN procedure is only available for disputes concerning allegedly "abusive" registration of domain name. There are three criteria that have to be met. 1.The domain name is identical or confusingly similar to a trademark or servicemark in which complainer has rights; 2.The domain name holder has no rights or legitimate interests in domain name; and
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