On Jun 26, 2008, at 4:30 PM, Jason Williams wrote:
3. It is somewhat anti-social to do so, but, that has rarely been a constraint on corporate greed, especially amongst the Intelectual Property crowd.
It doesn't seem to me to be "anti-social" behavior to ensure when your customers mistype your domain as a .net or .de (depending on the customer's locale) that they still end up at your site. Definitely, wouldn't ascribe it as corporate greed.
You are welcome to ascribe it to whatever you want. I will note that very few Non-profit organizations engage in such behavior. Very few governments do so, either. In fact, absent a corporate profit motive, this behavior seems very rare. It is my considered opinion that turning control of the Domain Name system over to WIPO and allowing them to decide that domains and trademarks had common namespace to ill-defined levels of degree with different categorical mappings that also had undefined translations was one of the biggest mistakes in internet history. Owen