No cyber-squatting please!

I recently received a polite e-mail from a Swiss competitor's legal council: they had discovered that someone had registered "their" Chinese web domain "www.competitor.cn" and had it redirected to ABB China's homepage at http://www.abb.com.cn/. Our competitor is also active in the Chinese market and have their own Chinese homepage at "www.cn.competitor.com/".

Despite all the Swiss politeness it was not difficult to read between the lines how upset they were. And so was I.

Needless to say, this kind of behaviour is unacceptable. Not only is it unethical and in breach of ABB's code of conduct, in some jurisdictions ABB may even be held financially responsible for any loss of business for the competitor.

We have our self been a victim of this technique some years ago. Someone had registered one of ABB's trade marks as domain name and had it redirected to the Siemens site. In that case we received all possible help from Siemens when we contacted them and the issue was quickly resolved.

Also the Chinese domain issue was quickly resolved in cooperation with our competitor and the local ABB organization. The culprit was not identified, but the address no longer redirects to our site.