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Comment by bhartzer | Hacker News Reader

What I don't understand is why companies and brands like this just don't use NameBlock or a similar domain blocking service like GlobalBlock.

They literally can block domain names that have their company name or brand in them from being registered (up to 500 variations of their domain).

It's literally like $99/year to place a block. Saves a lot of the hassle of having to deal with parody and phishing sites and trying to take them down.

Just block the domain(s) from being registered in the first place.

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This reads kind of like an advertisement. Plus it's subtly wrong.

My experience with the NameBlock API is that for those $99/year, they'll allow you to automate purchasing all similar domains. But then you have to pay registration fees on all of those domains, too. It's only $10/month per typo domain that you buy, but it sums up really quickly.

You're thinking of some other service, not NameBlock or GlobalBlock. There's no automated purchasing of all similar domain names. You don't pay registration fees, as the domains that end up being blocked will never be registered by anyone (not even you).

There literally is a block on the variations, it works at the Registry level not the registrar level.

The offending TLD here is .lol, which is not one of the TLDs they support. This would not have helped in this instance.

https://globalblock.co/included-extensions/

I'm also seeing much higher pricing:

https://www.101domain.com/global-block.htm

GlobalBlock is owned by GoDaddy, and pretty much covers the TLDs/extensions that are owned by GoDaddy Registry.

NameBlock is a separate company than GlobalBlock, and covers a different set of TLDs/extensions.

I didn't grab the pricing info for NameBlock because it requires you to sign an NDA to even see the pricing. I also don't see a list of TLDs they support.

How does that work in practice? Are you just paying them to lease it so you don’t have to?

If you place a block on a brand/companyname (a string of characters), then no one can register a domain name that contains those strings of characters. They also block up to 500 variations (placing a block on 'paypal' would get 'paypa1' blocked as well.

Those domains that are blocked won't be 'parked', someone trying to register the domain that's blocked, it will just say it's not available for registration.

I don't think you could block "clown" or "strike".

Yes, they could place a domain block on "crowdstrike", and variations of that would be blocked, such as cr0wdstrike, crowdstr1ke, etc.

I doubt it. They are protecting against variations of "crowdstrike"...Not every variation of domains with the word "strike" in it. That would go beyond reasonable.

You'd be surprised. I recently parked some big name domains ending in various common TLDs in the world of government contracting. They did utilize some sort of parking or service to do it for them, but certainly not enough.

How can such services exist? Why would the registrars listen to them?

The domains are blocked at the registry level, not the registrar level.

Okay, why would the registry listen to them?

Most don’t.

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