14 DAY TRIAL // Typosquatting is an issue for any big website out there. And it doesn't really get any bigger than YouTube. Google is now going after the owner of several domains with names similar to YouTube which lead to a survey scam page.
Youtbe.com, Youtub.com, Youtue.com, Youube.com and Yutube.com are all registered to the same owner, from the US.
And, at least until Google filed its complaint to the US National Arbitration Forum to get a hold of the domains, they all pointed to a survey scam site promising great rewards in exchange for private information.
Google is asking for ownership over the domains arguing that they are clearly misleading. The complaint was spotted by Fusible.
The company has to prove three main points before being handed over the domain. First, it has to own a trademark that is similar to the domain name in question. That's not an issue in this case, YouTube is clearly a Google trademark.
But that's not enough, the owner of the domain name disputed can't have a legitimate business or interest in the domain, i.e. it's not using it for something unrelated to the trademark in question.
Even with these two criteria met, Google also has to prove that the domain name owner registered with the intention to mislead unsuspecting users and that it's being used in that manner.
It's pretty clear that all three criteria are met in this case and Google should have no trouble shutting down the scammy sites. In fact, some of the domain names listed no longer work and none of them redirect to the scam online survey site they did before.
Twitter recently won a very similar case involving twiter.com. The domain was also used to point to scammy survey ads. In fact, interestingly enough, at one point twiter.com was pointing to the same fake YouTube site that the domains claimed by Google pointed to as well. Strangely though, even though Twitter won, it hasn't taken over twiter.com yet.