Nominet's DRS Rules against "domainers"

Or maybe this posting should be entitled: "Registering Domain Names typo's for Fun and Profit" The Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc in four recent DRS cases seems to have won three out of four typo disputes revolving around its www.privilege.co.uk domain: Privalege.co.uk - http://www.nominet.org.uk/disputes/drs/decisions/?contentId=2621 Privilige.co.uk - http://www.nominet.org.uk/disputes/drs/decisions/?contentId=3243 Privelage.co.uk - http://www.nominet.org.uk/disputes/drs/decisions/?contentId=3236 Privalige.co.uk - http://www.nominet.org.uk/disputes/drs/decisions/?contentId=3173 With Privalige.co.uk there is an appeal pending by RBS. The DRS ruled "no transfer" as it felt the bank hadnot adequately proved its case. The DRS is Nominets internal but independent review procedure for resolving disputes involving the UK domain space. There has been some criticisms of the workings of the DRS due to it appearing to favour large corporations attempting to enforce their trademarks and brands into the domain name space, even in the case of so called "dictionary word" or "generic" domains. For instance bounce.co.uk. However some DRS cases go almost by default, with the registrants failing to prepare or respond, when faced with opponents who have substantial and professional legal representation. In this event, the DRS experts attempt to look into the movitation behind the registration. With many of these disputes the Complainants usually successfully argue that the domain names at issue are only registered by "domainers" or professional registrants, to capitalise on any traffic generated as a result of the heavy brand promotion. Quite often the domainer will point these domains at PPC sites to collect advertising revenue. In one of the above decisions the Royal Bank of Scotland argued the registrations were "abusive" in that the domains were targeted towards Internet users, who while seeking access to RBC websites selling insurance products, had made " slight errors.." in their navigation. The problem with this it is circular and flies in the face of economics and to some extent the competition or the "enterprising spirit." Some argue that domainers are merely filling in the gaps in the domain space. For example when you usually make a typo error in entering a domain name into your browser you usually get a DNS error. But in these recent DRS cases the Internet Users were directed to sites with Pay Per Click links to car insurance firms bidding the most for "top spots." To some it's hard to see the economic harm, because the user might actually get a cheaper deal on his car insurance, and the domainer earns a commission for his enterprise. The root problem is that the domainer model is not fully understood and many in the industry regard it as improper and abusing the rights of other registrants who also hold valuable brands and trademarks. These cases also ought to be seen in perspective. Most people in fact search for the "thing" rather than the "brand." Last July on the Overture network (Yahoo Search Marketing) there were over 3 Million searches for the search term "car insurance." In contrast there were just under 7,000 for the term "privilage" and the mispellings are obviously substantially less than this. The problem for Professional domain registrants or "domainers" as they are called is that are looking for natural "type in" traffic. Quite often they don't know if a domain name is going to attract this type through traffic until it is registered. This is not a huge risk however because Domain Names are extremely cheap relative to Pay Per Click earnings. However some domainers will quite often attempt to predict the "popularity" of a domain by ascertaining its "OV" or Overture rating. The OV rating is the number of times people enter that domain into the Overture search engine network in a month. So for example "privilege.co.uk" has an OV rating of 163 for July, however the mispelling "privilage.co.uk" has an OV of just 47. This has to be contrasted with say carinsurance.co.uk which has a massive Overture rating of 665. It is therefore mildly entertaining that expensive capucinno drinking lawyers get dragged into these relatively trivial domain name disputes. They must be thinking "we should have done better at law school." One also wonders why large organisations spend significant sums of money on legal fees, contesting these minor domain cases, rather than diverting resources to acquire quality, high traffic domain names at market prices. Any Overture Tool results need to be interpreted with caution and can be unreliable. Overture is owned by Yahoo and the results are generated by the search strings people put into the Yahoo Toolbar. Keyword Assistant (Overture Tool): http://inventory.uk.overture.com/ Here is a third party Overture Checker: http://www.quickwhois.co.uk/overture.php