Search Engine Journal

Verisign Hijacking Domain Names with Paid Search Results

VeriSign has begun to redirect misspelled, non-existent, and expired domain names to its own web site which offers corrected spellings of these names, as well as paid advertising.

Verisign enjoys a government-granted monopoly as the master database administrator for .com and .net. Some criticism is already brewing that Verisign is taking full advantage of their monopoly and serving advertising which only betters themselves.

Verisign says that it handles over 20 million incorrect queries each day. Put a price tag on these mistakes, and that’s a petty penny earned for for a government granted service. What this will be leading to, may be a war over these nonexistent domain names between Verisign, AOL, Microsoft, and other Internet Service Providers and hosting companies.