Google loses battle for goggle.com Google has lost its cybersquatting fight with typo-snaffle site goggle.com, enabling its owner to carry on enticing clumsy typists into signing up for pricey text messaging services. The company's complaint against the domain name's current registrant, Barbados-based David Csumrik, was dismissed on procedural grounds yesterday …
Sorry Nigel but I don't like where the "quiet word" solution to the problem leads. It starts on the moral high ground with threats to nobble a scumbag's host. But how long before it's used nobble a legitimate site that happens to be a thorn in Google's (or a government's) side?
If the due process is flawed then it needs to be changed, transparently and openly. Not circumvented with a mafia-like threats.
I suspect that's the problem. Google have decided to buy goggle.com, but the current owner is asking a stupid price like 100 million. You can hire a lot a lot of lawyers for 100 million, and I doubt that the "survey" business makes even 1 million a year, so Google are haggling.
I remember when a certain sci/tech online magazine not a million miles from here was in negotiation with the owner of the corresponding .com domain...
On the one hand, the owner of goggle.com would appear to have a business model that is entirely based upon opportunistic manipulation of people landing on their site by accident, and the disappearance of this site would be a bad thing only for them. On the other hand, Google would appear to have already agreed to allow someone else (who later sold the domain) to operate a site using that domain name.
Quite rightly, Google shouldn't have the right to say what other people host on thier web sites. They were probably wrong to sign that agreement in the first place though.
Agreed. I think it might strengthen goggle.coms case if the website showed something related to the name - spectacles or porn perhaps? Porn would also incentivise Google to go for a quick resolution - XXX million should do nicely!
IANAL, so there's probably a boring reason why this elegant solution won't work
Yeah, but what if the nice people at no 6 kept any mail from a relative accidentally put through their letterbox. And then replied to the sender in a manner that could insinuate they were you, without directly saying it. And then signed the sender up to a DD to extract money from them for nowt.
Won't somebody think of the poor grannies!
I would be fairly surprised if the rights agreed with the previous owner are passed onto the new owner ... many contracts have clauses in them to prevent exactly this kind of thing (except in cases where the owning business itself is purchased).
IMO the owner of goggle.com should hand it over now before they get stiffed for costs :o
it depends on how the new owner obtained goggle.com.
If he bought it from the previous owners, the rights probably would transfer with it, or at least there is a reasonable expectation that they would.
If he bought a lapsed domain, then I doubt they would, as the agreement was between Google and the previous owners.
They haven't done anything illegal - they haven't even used someone else's trademark. All they are doing is trading on others mistyping which has nothing whatsoever to do with google. It's not like they have aped the Google home page to make it look similar, so people when they get there know they are in the wrong place.
If the current owner is just hosting a crap competition/scam and is in no way attempting to pass himself off as Google, I don't really see that they've got a case. Of course, he might have given them one if he's effectively agreed that whatever Google had cooked up with the previous owners of the domain is still in effect and he can be shown to have breached it.
Neither Google or Bing show Goggle, so obviously they've put a partial block into effect.
I Goggled from China and the ads were in Chinese characters. on my VPN to VietNam Goggle responded in Vietnamese then on my UK VPN it responded in English.
The Goggle site has some sophistication.
It would have cost $10/year for Google et al to have taken these domains all those years ago. Much better to spend tens or hundreds of thousands on lawyers now and take up court time with these frivolous cases several years later.
You might argue that hindsight is 20/20 but this was not a new problem even in 2000. And goggle.com was created on 14 Feb 1998, Google.com just 5 months earlier. twitter.com was registered in 2000 and twiter.com in 2004. Not much excuse there.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
