what's most interesting and troubling about this is that this is a registrar that is being accused of doing this.
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A new federal lawsuit charges that Dotster, one of the largest domain name registrars, has unlawfully participated in a massive cybersquatting campaign targeting companies such as Cingular Wireless, Disney, Ikea, Google, Neiman Marcus, Playboy and Verizon.
The lawsuit, filed Thursday by high-end retailers Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman, alleges that Dotster abused its status as a registrar by "checking out" hundreds of domain names that closely resemble the correct ones--and then keeping only the ones that were visited by Web users who couldn't spell very well.
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Frankly I'm not all that surprised it's a "major" registrar either. It seems like a lot of the businesses involved in the web market are kind of crooked. This is probably because it being so relatively new still, it's less regulated than other areas. For example the FCC exists to deal with so-called "public" spectrum and assigning licensing for it, etc (let's leave FCC corruption aside for now, lol). I think there's a similar organization that deals with some aspects of the WWW, but being an international network it's more complicated than that, and said organization (or organizations?) are also less mature and well-understand than the FCC. Both are susceptible to corruption, but it just seems like it's less often pointed out online.