Seven Mile

    Type in traffic will never go away, but the plumbing on the Internet is gradually changing…  Consider that domain tasting has added millions of kept domain registrations since late 2004..  That bled tons of traffic away from error search in the browser…

Then this morning it seems that the .cm (Cameroonian wild-card has expanded into .et (Ethiopia) …

http://domainstate.com/showthread.php3?s=eb86cbb1dbe947c91815aad99cf43bef&threadid=84165

I read that as this email whistled in relating to the Verizon DNS hijack:

“”The Verizon DNS hi-jack also works with non-existent third level domains.

I’ll have a screenshot later, but someone called me up to report that addresses like: Webmail.google.com resolve to a Verizon search page.

So, they are skimming a lot more traffic (every non-configured www.example.com), than thought.”"

As a domain owner how much of your type-in traffic goes missing as a result of skimming in the browser to the right of the dot? Consider all the ways you can loose traffic:

— Browser manufacturer skimming when users mistype YouDomainName.dom (look at the ‘d‘ and ‘c‘ on you keyboard

— CC Tld error takeover .ET (.NET) , .CM (COM), .CO (COM)

— Sitefinder style error hijack by your ISP such as Charter, Earthlink or Verizon ..  and this latest entrant.

My estimate is that 8-15%of your intended traffic gets taken over by everything across this spectrum (and that excludes cybersquatting and typosquatting)..  People are bad spellers and lazy typists.. There is just no incentive to help people get to their desired location when there’s money to be made be steering them awry.  8-15% of ‘your’ traffic may not seem like much, but extrapolate that over global Internet traffic and you’ll see why the incentive to continue the theft and marginalization within this racket is so large.

Take this shaping - this marginalization of the user experience to its illogical conclusion and the balance of power on the Web – and the Web itself fundamentally changes. DNS and ICANN will become less relevant.. The governing of the Internet will turn to the Telcos of the world…  to the browser manufacturers, to Google, to Microsoft. To CCTld operators with under developed and conveniently typable domain extensions.

   What could stop this?  Hardware could do it.  A .com key on the keyboard such as the one in my iphone Safari browser..  That’s a giant leap in the right direction!…  What could make it worse?…  You know we’re doomed when the big error search marginalizers listed above, start to race each other to buy cheap Chinese keyboard manufacturers around the world to protect the milk in the error search cow; or exploit it in new ways by moving the “c” key closer to the “d” or making the “o” key half the size of all others on the keyboard 

Perhaps one day a smart attorney or firm will build a racketeering case against one or more of the operators in this space.. Until then the thieving continues, and everyone who owns a domain name or operates a website will work 8-15% harder than they need to, in order to subsidize those stealing from them.