The domainers' worst enemy

Owen Thomas — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 12:21:55 EDT

Trust the Gray Lady to suck the drama — and the sense — out of a tech story. The New York Times profiles David Ulevitch of OpenDNS, an entrepreneur who's trying to make the Internet's domain-name system work better and faster. That means, of course, killing off the practice of "typo-squatting." Since the Times couldn't manage a decent explanation of this conflict, we'll oblige.Typo-squatting is a particulary unsavory side of the domain-name business. Clumsy Web users mistype website addresses all the time. Domainers, those wily entrepreneurs who register domain names in the hopes of making a profit, register common misspellings like "google.cm," and throw ads up on those websites, making a cheap and fast buck. (Business 2.0 recently profiled Kevin Ham, a domainer who's built a $300 million business on typo-squatting and other domain-name maneuvers.)

Ulevitch's OpenDNS would make typo-squatters an endangered species. By redirecting mistyped Web addresses to the correct site, Ulevitch makes life easier for Web surfers — and impossible for domainers. But then how does OpenDNS make money? Through advertisements displayed when an OpenDNS user accidentally types a search-engine query into his browser's address bar. Sounds like Ulevitch, just like his enemies, aims to profit from your mistakes. (Photo by Jim Wilson/The New York Times)

Gawker: valleywag, kevin ham

The domainers' worst enemy