Internet domain names have become increasingly important commercial tools, and are frequently treated as valuable assets in their own right. However, this growth in importance has also led to a corresponding growth in online abuses aimed at taking unfair advantage of or illicitly exploiting the reputation of legitimate businesses and their customers.

There are the cybersquatters, and typosquatters and many so-called “domainers”, who register domain names (sometimes by the thousand) identical or closely similar to legitimate business names and trade marks and use them for parasitic exploitation – typically for “click-through” monetization, or for phishing, or misdirecting potential customers to competing sites. There are others who use websites to market counterfeit and pirate goods or try to sell them through online auction sites, or misappropriate business names and trade marks to distort search engine rankings.