An article posted yesterday on CNNMoney.com titled ‘ the Man Who Owns the Internet‘, uncovered the real story behind the Search.om Oman proposal I wrote about last month.

Kevin Ham is a very big domainer, ie a person who is in the business of buying domain names of generic keywords, trademarks, and popular misspelled variations of these to make profit off advertisement placed on parking pages or by later reselling the domain names for huge amounts of money. This sort of activity is not illegal when it does not involve cybersquatting (the registration of a domain name that includes a trademark owned by another), but it is widely considered immoral as the domainer makes profit by the typos people make when trying to access popular domain names whose owners worked hard to make their website names popular.

This guy, Kevin Ham, has gone a step further in the domain name game and managed to convince the government of Cameroon to install the search.om-like-wildcard to make all traffic attempting to access unregistered domains under the .cm extension to be redirected to his advertisement filled website.

Millions and millions of people access by mistake unresolved .cm domains when trying to type a .com website. Kevin Ham is making crazy amounts of profit by taking advantage of typos of generic and trademarked words and proper trademarks that are not registered under the .cm extension. He is not strictly doing anything illegal in the traditional sense because he did not register any offending domain name (ie one that contains a trademark), but he is getting all the traffic from these websites because the trademark holder did not register the domain name. To cure the problem, the trademark holder would have to register the domain, which is, at least in theory but not necessarily in practice in Cameroon, something relatively easy to do.

Only the government of Cameroon can do something about this because it owns the .cm TLD. A few other countries in the world have a similar incidental advantage through typos, namely Colombia (.co) and, here it comes, Oman (.om), all of which are very common typos of the world’s most popular TLD, the dot com (.com).

Kevin Ham is obviously going to pay a lot of money to Oman, and he has apparently made an offer, but we should contribute to the unfair practices of such a shady business, he is clearly taking advantage of the greatest trademarks whose owners have not yet registered their domain names, he is would probably be misleading many visitors to think that they have visited the websites they attempted to access.

The .om TLD is a digital web gold mine, it is a national property, we do not need Kevin Ham’s money and should not let him have such control over it.

Read more about Kevin Ham and his dirty business here:
The .cm Scam
WIPO Arbitration Case Involving Kevin Ham
Yahoo Outsmarts Google in Cameroon Domain Play
The man who owns the Internet

The Telecommunications Regulatory Authority made an announcement in the papers earlier this week asking for some feedback regarding a proposal they got from a company to register a domain name Search.om and have all unresolved traffic from unregistered domain names under the .om domain name extension redirected to the Search.om website. I thought that I’ll chip in and voice my opinion, here is the letter I sent them today:

To: Telecommunications Regulatory Authority

Subject: Public Consultation on Search.om Proposal

After Compliments,

Regarding your request for feedback on the proposal of a company to register the domain name Search.om and to redirect all unresolved traffic under the .om domain name to Search.om, I would like to point out the following points to consider when making your decision.

A great deal on whether or not the TRA should grant this right to Search.om will depend on the landing page to which the unresolved traffic will be redirected to. Direct redirection to the homepage of Search.om without making a clear notice to the visitor that he had attempted to access a domain that has not been registered could give rise to a number of issues.

First of all, if no message was given to the visitor regarding the status of the domain name they attempted to visit, less savvy Internet users could easily assume when redirected that Search.om is in fact the website they intended to access. For example, a user wants to visit the Google search engine, instead of typing Google.com or Google.com.om, he mistakenly types Google.om, which is, at this moment, not registered by Google, under this proposal the user will be redirected to Search.om, and he might assume that this is in fact the Google search engine that he has heard of.

In addition to it possibly being misleading for casual Internet users, such a situation could also give rise to a trademark infringement action. The word Google is a registered trademark in the Sultanate of Oman and Search.com would be taking an unfair advantage of Google’s reputation by accessing all the traffic delivered through a domain name that contains the registered trademark of Google. This case could be argued by any trademark owner whose service could be confused with that of Search.om when accessed through a trademark infringing domain name.

The proposal summary does not state its effect on .gov.om and .edu.om domain extensions. Under no circumstances should such a company acquire traffic that attempts to access these domain extensions such as those for the authority they infer on web content.

The TRA should be aware of the fact that Search.com will host content that is not under the control of the TRA. Search.om will also probably monetize its content through advertising. The content of those advertisements will not be under the control of the TRA, and might not be under the control of the Search.com either if it attempts to join an advertisement network to show automated or contextual advertisements. All of this content along with the Internet search services it provides which could contribute to the discovery of pornographic, pirated, violent, and other forms of illegal materials, creates a huge amount of risk that has to be considered before attempting to get into this agreement, especially when considering the infinite number of domain names that carry the identity of the country which will forward visitors from Oman and elsewhere to this website.

Another point to raise – which is probably of less significance than the earlier ones – is the lack of any online means for checking the availability of domain names under the .om extension for registeration. Casual Internet users that wish to check whether a domain name has been registered or not simply do so by typing the domain name in the URL field of their Internet browser. When they get redirected to an existing website other than that of their ISP they instantly assume that the domain name has been registered and will not seek to register it if they originally intended to do so. This could, in theory at least, contribute negatively on the number of registered domains under the .om extension.

For those reasons I believe that granting access to unresolved traffic for .om domain names would be disadvantageous to the public, it could lead to confusion, and might constitute a trademark infringement in some cases. If the TRA is lured to enter into this deal with Search.com, I recommend that it imposes a set of conditions to force Search.om to include some obligatory content in the landing page to which the visitors will be redirected. Such content shall include:

1. A clear unambiguous statement in both Arabic and English notifying the user that he attempted to access a domain name that has not been registered.
2. A message in both Arabic and English stating that the domain name the user attempted to access could be registered by contacting the authority responsible for the .om domain name extension.

The TRA should ensure that Search.om search services include by default features for excluding offensive, illegal, and violent material from search results. The TRA should also hold Search.om fully responsible for all content displayed on its website, including content served through advertisements by third parties through automated and contextual advertising networks.

Yours faithfully,

Riyadh Al Balushi
Legal Researcher
The Ministry of Legal Affairs

Tel: 24489091
Fax : 24482851

DISCLAIMER: THIS LETTER IS NOT AN OFFICIAL OPINION BY THE MINISTRY OF LEGAL AFFAIRS AND SHALL NOT BE TREATED AS SUCH. ALL EXPRESSIONS, OPINIONS AND COMMENTS WRITTEN HERE WERE MADE BY RIYADH AL BALUSHI IN HIS PERSONAL CAPACITY.