TechSpot - PC Technology News and Analysis

Over the last decade, there has been an increasing number of ways in which domain name registration has been abused and domain trading has become a very lucrative 'industry'. Laws have been put in place so that owners of trademarks have better control and rights over certain related domain names. However with a second boom in online advertising, it's very common today to see zillions of web sites that rely on typosquatting - typographical errors made by users when inputting a website address into a browser - to gather huge amounts of web traffic and serve advertisements to these users.

A civil lawsuit filed last year by Dell against a group of domain registrars is revealing greater details on the amount of money these cybersquatters can amass from such practices. Dell alleges that these registrars have bought over a thousand domain names with trademark-infringing characteristics, however the most impressive side of the story is that the advertisement served in these pages in part comes from Google's Adsense contextual program, and the amount of revenue generated from the bulk of domains could be in the millions per month.