In December, a court awarded Verizon a $33.5M default judgment against OnlineNIC for typosquatting on 683 domain names such as verizonphnes.com. OnlineNIC, based in China, never even showed up at court.
While it might seem that a judgment such as this would be impossible to collect, the source for nearly all cybersquatting revenue originates from Google and Yahoo. Large, systematic cybersquatters such as OnlineNIC likely have substantial income streams coming from these firms.
Rex Liu, the CEO of OnlineNIC did show up for court in their appeal. OnlineNIC asserted that they only made $1,468.60 in revenue from the domain names. The financial risk of domain name abuse is rapidly exceeding the profits available.
