Whose Internet is it? [LWN.net]

Whose Internet is it?

Posted Sep 18, 2003 2:13 UTC (Thu) by zone (guest, #3633)
Parent article: Whose Internet is it?

Another important concern is the privacy of people who mistype .com and .net domain names (aka everyone). Taking a look at the Alexa Traffic Details for verisign.com, we see that Verisign has risen from a traffic ranking of ~4000 to the top 100 in just two days time. That puts it above Tripod, About.com, and yes, even above Doubleclick.

The software to analyze who meant to go where, and where they were coming from (Referer: header), is simple enough, and you can bet Verisign is already thinking about or has created the software that generates detailed reports on just that. Advertisers and marketing agencies of all breeds would love to pay for that kind of information, and it's reasonable to assume Verisign will continue to refine its software to tie typos to individuals over time.

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Whose Internet is it?

Posted Sep 18, 2003 12:54 UTC (Thu) by ressu (subscriber, #14615) [Link]

In fact, this is the same issue that Microsoft has with MSN search, all mistyped queries from IE go to MSN Search. And now we just keep seeing reports how big and used MSN Search is, while most of the queries are (Eh, were..) just mistyped domains.