What is cybersquatting?
Cybersquatting is registering a domain name that trades on someone else's brand in bad faith, usually to resell it at a markup or to intercept traffic intended for the brand.
The bad-faith element is what separates it from an ordinary prior registration. Someone who registered a common word before a brand existed is not a cybersquatter; someone who registered the brand's exact name the week its rebrand leaked is.
Where a trade mark exists, the formal routes are a UDRP complaint through an approved provider such as WIPO, or an equivalent registry procedure — Nominet's DRS for .uk names. Where no registration exists, those routes are generally unavailable, and acquisition is usually faster than dispute.
The same pattern appears on social platforms, where it is handled as an impersonation or trade mark report rather than a domain dispute, because there is no registrar to complain to.
Related terms
- UDRPThe UDRP is the arbitration procedure for recovering a domain name registered in bad faith against a trade mark, run through approved providers such as WIPO rather than through a court.
- TyposquattingTyposquatting is registering a near-match of a brand's domain or handle — a transposed letter, a missing character, a swapped top-level domain — to catch people who mistype the real one.
- Social media handleA social media handle is the unique username that identifies an account on a platform — the @name in its URL — and, unlike a display name, only one account per platform can hold it.