Growing e-commerce industry attracts cybersquatting to India

Cybersquatting is the term used for registering domain names of known brands and entities with the intent to profit from their goodwill. With the growing e-commerce space in India, this illegal practice has also found its way into the country and is becoming a problem for cyber security.

In the last 10 years, India's domain name regulator has transferred more than 700 web addresses that end with ‘.in’ and ‘.co.in’, which were done from illegal registrars; the transfers have been done to major companies including Pepsi, Morgan Stanley, Walmart, McDonalds, Amazon, Flipkart and Skype.

"The number (of companies lodging complaints of cybersquatting) is steadily increasing as we receive 7-8 cases a month," RR Krishnaa, legal officer for National InternExchange of India (NIXI), told ET. NIXI is an autonomous regulator for domain names in the country, and has received more than 20 such complaints between December 15 and January 15, as per Krishnaa.

"About 95% of such cases are transferred to the complainant through arbitration and some might get dismissed and some might go to the courts," Krishnaa continued.

It was in 2004 that the Indian government had authorised NIXI to operate and manage the ‘.in’ registry in the country. It also acts as a dispute reversal agency for ‘.in’ and ‘.co.in’ domain suffixes according to India's .In Dispute Resolution Policy (INDRP).

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