Of concern to some may be the registering of imitation URL’s or domain names, particularly by companies outside the United States that do not exist under the same laws as practiced here.

For example, if your company is called ABC Products and you have registered the domain name as abc.com, one of these companies may use you as a drawing card by registering the URL abcproducts.com and hope to initiate and induce traffic to a counterfeit site. The counterfeit site may not look anything like your web site; however, the site would contain links to other sites that sell products and services very similar to yours.

This practice is now very common within the financial services industry.

The companies registering the URL, through agreements with the competitors, get paid click-through revenues when a visitor enters into the competitor’s site. In essence what they are anticipating is that visitors will type in the full name of company, rather than its registered URL, which is often abbreviated for ease of use or remembrance.

Ownership of URL’s can be checked at http://www.networksolutions.com/whois/index.jhtml or http://www.internic.net/whois.html

The easiest way to prevent this from happening to your URL is to register additional URL’s that reflect your company’s exact name. Should this be a desired course of action for you, remember that AFFCOM will direct alternate URL’s to your web site at no additional charge.