Could this really happen again to one of the world’s largest portals? In 2004, someone hijacked the domain name eBay.com for a short period. How could something like this have ever been allowed to happen? Perhaps the bigger question, how could this actually happen again to another company of similar presence?

Even with the precedence of the eBay high jacking, Google was unable to prevent its own name from falling into the hands of a cyber squatter, at least for a day. Visitors to the German Web site of Google.de, did not see the Google logo when they logged onto the site last Tuesday morning. Instead, they saw the name of a local Internet service provider with the message that no content was available for the domain. How did this happen? The domain name was transferred to a new ISP somehow. All that Google could say is, “This will never happen again, rest assured; there will be changes”.

This just goes to show you how vulnerable we all are to cyber squatting. If this could happen to eBay and Google, with all of their protections in place, how are we to protect our small business names? In my opinion, we need to pass stronger legislation which gives us as business owner’s sharper teeth when things like this happen, and only then will there be a significant deterrent.