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Guest article: Intermediair.nl accused of hijacking XING URL
Author: Michel Rijnders from HRlog.nl
This post is the English version of the Dutch article “Intermediair beschuldigd van domeinkaping“.
In The Netherlands one of the most visited jobsites Intermediair caused a dispute with business network Xing by registering and redirecting the URL Xing.nl to the homepage of Intermediair.nl. A Dutch blogger pointed out the ‘theft of Dutch vistors’ of Xing.com that type in the wrong extension and the bad name that Intermediair.nl gets from this action.
Behind the story is, however, more than the ordinary hijacking of a domain name. Intermediair registered the domain name in 2000, long before Xing.com was registered as a brand the way it is now and long before Xing even was the network as we know it nowadays. The reason why Intermediair registered the domain name is not known but it was probably meant for one of their own services.
Intermediair now of course will know Xing.com and they will see traffic generating from Xing.nl by people that use the wrong extension. For a company like VNU Media, which is the publisher of Intermediair, every visitor of Xing.nl is bad publicity because they don’t see the website they want to see and they will immediately think of a case of domain hijacking. This is not the kind of publicity you want as a company. The wisest thing to do would be deactivating the domain name or just give it to Xing.
Intermediair however offered to sell the domain name to Xing.com for a ‘fair price’, which of course can vary from registration costs to bigger figures. Xing isn’t amused and have taken action by informing Intermediair about the abuse of the brand name and asked them to stop. The spokesperson of Xing AG stated to weblog Recruitmentmatters that they are considering taking legal action against the abuse of the brand name. In the meantime, the url Xing.nl still redirects to Intermediair.nl. This easy to solve dispute will probably be continued.
First come, first serve: it will be interesting to see how this legal struggle will come out in the end. Talking about the importance of career site branding: even the big monster career site faces limitations on the dutch waterfront: just call http://www.monster.nl and see what you’re getting….
Cheers, Richard
@Richard: the Monster.nl story is a bit different. .nl domains were reserved for / assigned to cities. The city (village) of Monster therefore got the sole right on the domain name monster.nl. There is nothing Monster coold have done against that.
Interesting now is that the names changed and monster.nl isn’t in use for Monster anymore. The question will be if they will keep the url monster.nl or that they let it expire or ‘give’ it to Monster.com. For Monster it is not that big of a problem becuase in the Netherlands everybody knows the job board by the name of Monsterboard.nl and less by Monster.