Frank Schilling’s got the blogging bug. He just start blogging a few days ago and I’ve already got difficulties keeping up with his great posts. One of his latest articles “When is a Typo Domain, Not a Typo?” shows how difficult it can be to distinguish between a typo and a generic domain in some cases.

Truly generic domains are free to be registered by anyone and owning them does not make you a cybersquatter, as you didn’t take something that actually belonged to someone else, but rather claimed a stake that was available to everyone before. That’s pretty much a clear case. But how about the following scenario:

Deel.com (not owned by me) may look like a variation of Dell.com but in fact it can also be a brandable variant of “Deal” the English word for ‘discount’ or ‘bargain’. This is not an isolated example. I own eShopping.com and paid alot of money to acquire that name at auction because it is one of the big “e” names (email, ecommerce, eshopping etc.) But wait!! The “E” is very close to the “S” on my QWERTY keyboard. Does that make it a typo of Shopping.com?!

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Representatives of Yahoo indicated they would try to secure Flicker.XXX as a TYPO of Flickr.com (their made up brand name) during a potential new TLD sunrise period.

[via Seven Mile]