The Ethics of Typos

I saw a really interesting story online this week about how Google may be making as much as $500,000,000 a year on typos. On the face of it, this sounds absurd – how could anyone possibly make that kind of money on typographic errors? Granted that there is good money to be made serving as a proofreader and editor – I’ve made my living that way, although it’s much harder to do since the spell-checker function became standard on word processor software. But is still seems massively unlikely that a search engine and advertiser could make that amount of money on such mistakes – until you realize that the typos in question aren’t errors at all, and Google is only making money by providing advertising space to the actual culprits…

According to an article off the New Scientist website, the scheme known as “typosquatting” is becoming an increasing headache for online businesses (and even content providers). It’s the relatively simple process of registering a misspelled version of a popular web domain – basically taking any common dot-com destination and registering something that is one letter off from the original URL, in the way a hasty typist might misspell it. It’s a problem because hits on Google – and the sidebar ads you get when you Google something – are driven by traffic, with the more common results and ads coming closer to the top. If the number of sites using this practice is accurately estimated by the authors – and if all of the sites using the practice place Google ads – the company could be netting as much as half a billion dollars in the process…

Naturally, someone whose business was siphoned off in this fashion is suing Google for the way their search results (and ads) pop up, and may eventually win compensation for damages, although it’s hard to see why this practice is Google’s fault in the first place. If people are unable to type your domain name correctly they’re not going to find your site no matter how their search engine works – and if they’re too stupid to realize they’ve been deceived, it doesn’t seem likely that they’d be much use to your business in the first place. I’m reminded of the fact that “White House.com” is actually a porn site – the actual website for the White House is “White House.gov” just as you’d expect. If you can’t tell a porn site from a government web presence, you’re probably not someone who really needs to access the government site in the first place…

So the question is, if the practice of “typosquatting” is legal in the United States, and for the moment it is, why should Google be held responsible for selling ads to the people who are using this scheme, or for registering their sites? By the same token, Google is in no position to try to figure out which misspelled words are evil attempts to misappropriate someone else’s web traffic and which ones are simply comical misspellings chosen as the name of a legitimate site (Attytood.com and Fud.com come to mind), and even if they were, you’d effectively be asking a private company to perform a kind of mass censorship over the names of websites. Yet, at the same time, this practice could very well be costing consumers half a billion dollars each year; lost funds that drive legitimate companies to raise prices and work against the best interest of anyone who isn’t running a typosquatting scam. Should such a practice be outlawed? If it was, how could you enforce such a law? Shouldn’t we just be working on improving literacy, decreasing gullibility, and increasing the caution of Internet users? Or should we just say “Let the surfer beware!” and let things slide the way they are?

It’s worth thinking about…