Yahoo Outsmarts Google in Cameroon Domain Play ?
Posted by ekwogefee | 16 Jun, 2007
I won't stop being amazed as to how much we cameroonians undervalue our country. Letting a single individual make a launghing stock of this nation of ours by accepting to route misspelled .cm domains to an advertisement site that is not even Cameroonian.
The original post, by Paul Sloan, can be found in http://blogs.business2.com/sloan/2007/05/yahoo_outsmarts.html
Below I will just display the main article together with some select comments from Cameroonians like me :
Main Article
Yahoo
takes a lot of heat for always playing catch up to its cross-valley
rival, Google (GOOG). But Yahoo did do something back in 2004 that,
while small, deserves some credit--it registered the domain name
Yahoo.cm. That's right, .cm, which is the country code
for the West African country of Cameroon and one easy typo away from
the all-powerful .com. Google, on the other hand, never did register
its domain name with Camtel, the registry for Cameroon--and that little oversight has become a bit of a headache for Google.
In the June cover story of Business2.0, The Man Who Owns The Internet, I write about how a domainer named Kevin Ham struck a deal with the government of Cameroon to set up a wildcard
-- a line of software code that reroutes all traffic that goes to a .cm
name that isn't registered. (Cameroon, keep in mind, has just
167,000 computers connected to the Internet, and very few .cm names are
registered). The typo traffic flows through a site called Agoga, where
it is served up ads from Yahoo (YHOO). As I explain in the piece, Ham
seems to be in the clear legally because he's not actually registering
the domains but is instead getting the traffic through a wildcard. But
Google wasn't happy to discover the .cm play. A Google spokesman told
me the company very much considers Google.cm an infringement of its
trademark, and that its lawyers had been in touch with Ham's attorneys.
Then, just before the article went off to the press, I noticed that
Google.cm was no longer going to Agoga -- it looked like it had been
snagged by someone else. Then I checked a few other big-traffic names,
such as Apple.cm and NYTimes.cm. Curious. Those too had been
registered, set up by someone else trying to make money off the typo
traffic. It seems like someone saw Ham's play and went right to
Cameroon to buy some big names.
Ham told me this is really no
big deal for him, and in some ways it is a relief. The .cm play is a
very small part of his business and trademark names, even if he's doing
nothing legally improper, can create legal headaches. I'm certain that
the whoever has been snagging these .cm names is already getting plenty
of calls from lawyers at Google and elsewhere.