Ahh, one of my favorite topics to discuss in the domain name sector - Typosquatting (or cybersquatting). If you are not familiar with the term, then here's a full Wikipedia page dedicated to the term. But let me give you a TL;DR definition.
Typosquatting, also called URL hijacking, a sting site, or a fake URL, is a form of cybersquatting, and possibly brandjacking which relies on mistakes such as typos made by Internet users when inputting a website address into a web browser. Should a user accidentally enter an incorrect website address, they may be led to any URL (including an alternative website owned by a cybersquatter).
So, basically people who have domain names that might be misleading as other more well-known entity. There are many examples and many of those examples come with interesting stories. Let's take a look at a few of them.
Nissan.com
So you know that pretty famous Japanese car brand called Nissan right? Well go to their website and then come back. It's ok, I'll wait. 😎
What did you see? Interesting right?
Mr. Nissan and the Nissan car company battle has been one of the longest running legal case over the domain name nissan.com. Mr. Nissan got hold of this domain name as part of his automobile service company in 1994. Which about 5 years later the Nissan motor company started to come after.
In 2004, it was decided that Mr Uzi Nissan can keep his domain name, but the Nissan Motors hasn't stopped coming after the domain name. Nissan Motors goes by nissanusa.com, nissan-global.com, nissan-motors.com and other domain names for their web presence. Can you imagine what their marketing team is going through with this debacle?
The nissan.com homepage is currently showing an interesting page.
An interesting excerpt from the Wikipedia article is this.
In July 2020, Uzi Nissan died of complications from COVID-19.
I guess that's why Nissan motors is coming after this domain name again.
Gail.com
I love this one. Check out the website! - https://gail.com - you will see a simple page with some Q&A's. This one is particularly interesting.
In 2020 this page received a total of 5,950,012 hits
So, people are mistakenly typing "gmail.com" as "gail.com" and this site gets almost 6 million hits in a single year. The domainer in you is right now calculating and converting that number to a potential ad revenue. So now you know why people are typosquatting.
It won't stop
To be fair, some may call it typosquatting or cybersquatting, while domainers would call it an opportunistic domain purchases. There really is no legal basis to stop people from buying "toogle.com", "foogle.com", "google.coffee", "gotmail.com" and multiply them with all the new TLDs we've seen arriving. You can go out there and by "twitter.coffee". If you use that for something, most likely Twitter will come after you. Whether you will win that legal case, well, that would be case-by-case scenario.
Nissan.com and Gail.com are quite big examples of typosquatting, but having been in domain industry for the past 10 years, I can honestly tell you that it is a widespread business. People would not be telling you about it because they will want to keep a low-profile, while the traffic continues to arrive and some covert to ad revenue. And while "twitter.coffee" is available, the very fact that Twitter is not gobbling up every twitter TLD means that they'd rather focus their effort in other things. So an opportunistic domainer will most likely buy "twitter.coffee" and park it or put a simple ad on it to monetize, silently.
What's your thought on typosquatting or cybersquatting?