Internet Life

Facebook Sues Face-Book

For its domain name?

By Bogdan Popa, Security and Search Engines Editor

27th of September 2007, 18:21 GMT

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The famous social networking website Facebook filed a lawsuit against Face-book.com, a domain owned by Fabulous.com PTY LTD. Although the reasons are not quite clear, Facebook

probably wants to obtain the domain which might bring it some additional traffic since many of the users are reported to make typing mistakes into their address bar. The official page of the World Intellectual Property Organization presents the details for case D2007-1193 with Facebook Inc. as a complainant and Privacy Ltd. Disclosed Agent for YOLAPT as a respondent. The domain involved in the lawsuit is Face-book.com so it is probably the reason I was talking about.

Now, do you think that face-book.com would be able to bring so much traffic to the social network in order to worth a lawsuit? I would say no, due to the Google SERP which is quite relevant in this matter.

Let's do a simple test. Go over to the main page of the Google search engine (which today celebrates the 9th birthday), and type 'facebook' into the search box. Obviously, the first result is the main page of the social network while the domain involved into the lawsuit, face-book.com is not even listed among the first 10 results. Now, try to do the same process but type 'face-book' instead of 'facebook'. The results are almost the same, with the official page of the social network on position number one. Moreover, Google asks us "Did you mean facebook?".

The domain is not listed even if you type face-book.com so I don't think its position in the Google SERP is the reason for the lawsuit. So, there's only one more speculation left: Facebook wants the domain because numerous users are typing a wrong address in the URL bar which doesn't redirect them to its main page. If Facebook manages to obtain face-book.com, every time a visitor types this address, it is automatically redirected to facebook.com. Just as simple as that.

TAGS:

facebook | lawsuit | domain

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