Domain Squatters ... would fighting back work?

[Duwelon]

Ever tried to register a new domain name that you thought would be unique, only to find some odd looking page already there, with a lot of links to various products, most of which you never heard of anyway? You contact the "owner" to find they want several thousands "as a minimum bid to begin the negotiations".

Ever had an idea for a website, thought of the perfect URL for it that you don't believe violates any trademark, go to register it at your favorite registrar, only to find that it's already taken? "What could they possibly doing with that URL?" you ask, as you go visit the page, only to find the domain also owned by a squatter who only uses it for the random links it generates. If you can think of a clever sounding domain name, chances are unless it has some wacky spelling, it is already owned by a domain squatter.

Is what they're doing illegal? No. Do their squatted pages contribute anything to the internet? No. Here's what i've thought of of a way to fight back against these people:

Virtually everyone on this forum has heard of Folding@Home i'm sure, where your spare CPU cycles are turned into helping the medical community finding cures for diseases etc. What if someone developed a simple "Squatting@Home" application that takes a list of URL's used only for web squatting, by web squatters and the network of say a million (thinking optimistically) users around the world visit every squatted site that's known. THe list of sites would be updated like an AV list or something like a Peerguardian blocked list, with just URL's.

The app would be simple: it would visit the squatter URL and follow a random link on the page then go to the next site on the list or a random site on the list.

The effects as i see it would be thusly:

1) The company that advertises with the squatter's network of pages would have wasted a click for every time the app goes there. The effects for advertisers would be to put less value in the advertising capability of squatters. We're not talking about millions of people losing their jobs here, the squatting marketing companies dont' take much manpower to run.
2) The web visitation statistics for squatter's would be FUBAR if enough people were involved, causing regret to those who buy a squatted domain for the tens of thousands they ask for them. The idea here is to make domain squatting less profitable with the end goal of allowing more domains to be available for legitimate use.

To pull it off, people's PC when not in use, like folding@home, would randomly visit web pages, maybe based on a randomly seeded value for each page so not every page is accessed the same number of times. The stats wouldn't be published, so the squatters couldn't simply "subtract" the stats from their visitor counts to get the real number of visits.

I'm not a lawyer but I don't see anything illegal about this. We'd just be using our PC's to visit random pages from squatters. What do you guys and gals think?

 

[deadlyapp]

I think your logic is all fucked up.

I bet that all links on those squatter pages are pay-per-clicks, so basically your plan would just EARN them millions.

 

[Duwelon]

I think your logic is all fucked up.

I bet that all links on those squatter pages are pay-per-clicks, so basically your plan would just EARN them millions.

Think about it, they would earn money initially but the people advertising on their network would see zero return on that money because nobody actually saw any advertisements. Imagine you sell some Widget and pay Squatters-R-US $0.10 per click. Squatters-R-Us then generates 100,000 unique visits for your product's page, but you sell 0 out of 100,000 clicks. Would you go back to said company to advertise again or would you look elsewhere for your advertising dollars?

 

[mb]

How about instead of visiting the site it just does a DoS attack?

 

[gorcorps]

Think about it, they would earn money initially but the people advertising on their network would see zero return on that money because nobody actually saw any advertisements. Imagine you sell some Widget and pay Squatters-R-US $0.10 per click. Squatters-R-Us then generates 100,000 unique visits for your product's page, but you sell 0 out of 100,000 clicks. Would you go back to said company to advertise again or would you look elsewhere for your advertising dollars?

No, YOU need to think about it. They get a certain amount by views only, and some for clicks. By giving them those views you're getting them a lot more money. Who cares if what's being advertised there isn't being clicked? They're still getting the money they're after.

 

[theflyingpig]

Your post amuses me greatly. Duwelon, I picture you gleefully getting ready to register a new domain, only to find that it has been squatted. I wish I could have been there when you realized that your dream domain had been taken, and that there was nothing you could do about it. I wish I could have been there as you sat, curled in the fetal position, quietly discussing with yourself the details of your plan to destroy all squatters. I wish I could have been there, but I wasn't. I suppose your post will just have to do.

 

[Duwelon]

No, YOU need to think about it. They get a certain amount by views only, and some for clicks. By giving them those views you're getting them a lot more money. Who cares if what's being advertised there isn't being clicked? They're still getting the money they're after.

... the point is, the money being paid to squatters would not generate any revenue for those who use their services. They'd get money initially, but they'd be damn quick to re-negotiate their contract to a much lower fee per click or visit once they realize their services aren't worth as much as other places like Google Adwords.