Nowadays, Domain auctions are not a rarity; therefore, this business is not always quite legal. There is a direction of the Internet business called cyber squatting.
The cyber squatters were extremely active in the end of the last century. Since 1998 - 2000, the situation on the cyber squatters' market has changed. The juridical background, a number of the market participants, strategies, used at the domain auctions, are different for the moment.
The preparation for the domains registration made this business unacceptable for the novices, who would not like to make significant investments. The reason is that the domain auctions do not bring permanent profits. Therefore, it is not very easy to determine the number of cyber squatters remained. There is a practice to register domains for the friends and relatives of the cyber squatters. It is very complicated to prove the malice in such cases. All documents may look absolutely correct and legal.
At the same time, the modern Internet space has less problems with the cyber squatting than it used to be before. The most part of the interesting domain names has been already captured. These domain names are coinciding with the registered trade marks. In some cases the domain names, which will become valuable in some time, can be predicted due to the future events in the policy and business. Additionally, there are some opinions that the domain names, containing widespread words, are more valuable for today than the domains, containing the trade marks. The one, who was the first, will get the maximal profits from the selling. The cyber squatter can register about one hundred domain names. It requires significant investments; however, if he sells only one of them at the domain auctions, it will cover his spending.
The current legislation is useful for the cyber squatters. There are many ways for the cyber squatters to save the captured domain names. Simultaneously, the companies and the people, who are trying to get the domain names for free, have fewer chances. It appears to be a better way to redeem the domains instead of wasting the time for the legal procedures. Actually, there are a few legal processes around the captured domain names. People prefer to solve all these precedents in a private way.
The document falsification is a very popular type of the domains capturing. Lawyers use a graphology expertise for resolving such cases. If there are any proofs of the falsification, then the domain names go back to the administrator, who had been the owner of this domain before the conflict took place.
Design studios and hosting companies are not rare participants of such processes. They register domain names for themselves and, afterwards, they refuse to pass these domain names to the companies that have already paid for the domains.
The domain auction script is a very popular tool for the cyber squatters. Thus, technical details of this business are not very important. Business acumen and an ability to predict some social events are main components for the success of the cyber squatter. However, some changes in the legislation may be directed to stop these, not quite legal, activities.