All attempts to visit non-existent domains ending in .cm now land surfers at an identical advertising page.
If you attempt to visit microsoft.cm, ebay.cm, or forget the O in almost any of the 54 million .com domains in existence, you are taken to the same ad landing page.
There’s hard revenue in the system. According to Alexa statistics, the domain google.cm was the 97,576th most-popular site on the web on August 7, 2006, having spiked the week before, now reaching 120 out of every million web users.
That makes the misspelling more trafficked than brands such as Hoover and Kleenex.
Other domains, including ebay.cm and msn.cm, were not quite as popular, but still registered on Alexa in the top couple of million sites on the web. There are also handfuls of sites that link into these misspelled domains.
The West African nation of Cameroon has about 16 million citizens and, with an estimated gross domestic product of about $32bn, is less wealthy than the largest US technology companies.
The redirects use what is known as DNS wildcards. Instead of returning an error message when a non-existent domain is lookup up, the registry returns a pointer to the ad landing page. Wildcards are a documented part of the DNS standards, but many consider them harmful when introduced at the top-level of the DNS.
VeriSign Inc, for example, was soundly reprimanded when it introduced wildcards to the .com and .net domains in late 2003, while other domains, such as .tv, managed to use wildcards without attracting criticism for years.
VeriSign’s Site Finder service was similar, in that misspellings of domains landed surfers at and ad page, but the misspellings were at the second-level, before the dot. Typing micorsoft.com would have activated Site Finder, but microsoft.cm would not.
VeriSign turned off Site Finder after complaints from ICANN, its government-appointed overseer. While ICANN has formal relationships with many country-code domain operators around the world, Cameroon is not one of them, so its powers here are limited.
While Cameroon’s domain is administered by CamTel, the state telecommunications provider, apparently currently undergoing privatization, it appears that the landing page is hosted by a North American company.
According to a Whois lookup, the wildcard points to an IP address used by hosting provider Peer 1 Network Inc and domain registrar NameView Inc, both of which are based in Vancouver, Canada.
CamTel appears to sell .cm registrations for about $100 per year, so technically any company that wants to should be able to minimize this brand damage, by paying CamTel. It appears that Yahoo! Inc, for example, owns yahoo.cm.
The practice of wildcarding domains has been equated in the past with typosquatting, a form of cybersquatting practiced since the 1990s in which misspellings of popular brands are registered in order to generate advertising revenue.
Typosquatting was partially outlawed in the US with the Truth in Domain Names Act, which bans using typos to direct clumsy-fingered children to pornography. The most famous typosquatter, John Zuccarini, received 30 months in prison in 2004 for directing dinseyland.com to an adults-only web site.
