ICANN president and CEO Rod Beckstrom warned the public that the group can expect excitement, opportunity, uncertainty and threats in the days to come. ICANN is one of the key players in the function and accessibility of today’s global internet. They have been charged with the task of coordinating and segregating domain names throughout the world and managing the complex, demanding task of enabling IP addresses to recognize each other across cyberspace.

The coordination of individual IP addresses to specific domain names used to be a task of the US government. Since the government has allowed these operations to go private, a few kinks still have to be ironed out.  While ICANN is unable to alter any content on the internet, their intimate control of the global web and much of its inner-workings has sparked some controversy. Beckstrom is aware of the ethical dilemmas and is optimistic about implementing major changes to circumvent them.

ICANN has been criticized for being a group that controls the Domain Name System while many of its key players and leadership positions are occupied by execs from the Domain Name industry. This creates a clear conflict of interest. ICANN is a not-for-profit group who is not supposed to represent or promote the financial interests of any parties. Chief criticisms have stemmed from the idea that power players on the ICANN team can exploit the group’s manipulation of the internet to serve their own corporate needs.

Other criticisms have come from the intimate access these supposedly neutral parties’ possess. This kind of power can invade privacy and lead to motives that are fraudulent . Risk for this type of abuse is wide open to corporate executives who act in a biased, self-serving way. Personal information and data can be used to illegally bolster profits. Any person or group who wishes to register their business as a top level domain name can become an accredited registrar by making an agreement with ICANN. Critics see this is as a clash of interested when the heads of top level domain names are themselves high ranking members at ICANN.

Beckstrom held a speech in Costa Rico where he declared that it is time to “tighten up the rules that have allowed perceived conflicts to exist within our board.” Beckstrom is adamant that the necessary changes needed to make ICANN a neutral public service can be achieved. If Beckstrom fulfills his stated intentions, he will “ensure that absolute dedication to the public good supersedes all other priorities.”

Domain · Domain Name Registration · ICANN · Risk · Security

Think there’s no such thing as squatting on the internet? Think again. Domain name squatting has been getting increased criticism as this questionable practice receives more widespread attention worldwide.

What is domain name squatting? Well, think about what traditional property squatting is. People move into a space and live there; it may not technically be their property, but no one was using it. Domain name squatting is similar. Someone buys the domain name of a high profile individual; it’s not actually their own name, but no one had bought the rights to the URL, so nothing stopped them from creating a site there.

But that’s where the differences end. While itinerant squatters are generally just looking for a free place to live, domain name squatters are looking to profit from snapping up the name. Why would someone pay a lot of money to recover a domain for a site they had no previous intention to build? Well, because it may be damaging for that domain name to exist under the control of someone else.

When a person’s name is the entire domain name, it will perform very well in the search engines when that name is searched for; after all, it’s a perfect match. Domain name squatters may even pursue SEO to get the name ranking highly. When it comes up on the top, they can redirect visitors to damaging pages, including inappropriate content, sites with poor security reputations, and competitors’ websites. This can be incredibly damaging to the person whose name has been ‘squatted,’ so they may be willing to pay high sums of money to gain domain registration control over the address.

To clarify, this is not the same as buying a domain name and building a brand around it, then selling it to a company or business who would benefit from owning that name. If you buy a domain name that you think will be potentially popular or useful to a company down the line, but it’s not a trademarked name or the name of an individual person, that’s one thing. But if you buy a domain name with the sole purpose of pressuring that person to buy it from you to avoid negative branding, that can be considered extortion and is against internet protocol.

Knowing the risk of domain name squatting is a good argument for buying up domain names similar to your own name or your business name. There’s no guarantee that someone will squat it if you don’t buy it, but there is a guarantee that they can’t squat if you get to it first.

Buy a Domain Name · buying a domain · Domain Name · Domain Name Squatting