Opinion

Is China’s Bing leading the charge for foreign domain names? A recent investigation conducted by blog TorrentFreak showed the clear disparities in a search engine’s hosted images. Once the site receives its results, it creates a safe feedback loop which allows pictures of brand names and graphics to be saved as the first result, underscoring Microsoft’s penchant to “borrow” domain names, an innovation that stands in sharp contrast to more generic search engines such as Google and Yahoo.

Surprisingly, Bing is not new to conducting unethical domain name steals — but the violation happens more often in the Netherlands than anywhere else in the world. The same link was used in the German mapping giant Google Maps and as soon as a person searched for this link, Bing prominently displayed the domain name. However, things are much different in China where Bing actually sends out consent letters to domain name holders saying that the company will return the URL if the owner is willing to surrender the domain name.

Opinion

Many believe that sites such as Google Maps and Bing Maps are too thoroughly subject to surveillance to help private companies infringe on domain names. However, this is yet another blow to the growing brand awareness of the United States. Stateside companies like Apple and Google have already paid astronomical sums for domain names in China.

Those who searched for the Google Maps domain name found Bing’s page in the first box. The first message displayed was the screenshot from the Google website and read: “Domain Name was used as a preview and we apologize for this delay and are working to recover this page” (banner shown above). Microsoft’s take on the same issue: the “Top .com domain names released” page and the “Forgot about that? We got your .com address” page did not appear to change in the two links above, making it clear that even though the search engine has been closing the domain on Google Maps, it isn’t as conscientious of the company’s rights as its Western peers.

Microsoft’s practice does not make a sound legal basis. Every search engine has to connect the web page that one wants to see (which automatically reveals the domain name) with the websites containing it in order to present the website. Is this a best practice or not? Many people who visit Bing’s link to confirm a name of a website may think that Bing was truly using the URL as a preview and the regular reader would not know any other way to find the corresponding website. However, it’s disingenuous and unfair to publicly entrust your personal information to a company like Microsoft. Most likely, if Microsoft considers a domain worth such a high amount of money for its product, it would certainly try to use it to its full advantage. Such an unethical search engine is a letdown.

But if the search engine makes it so clear that it uses this data (sometimes even that it pays for it), why is it keeping the information confidential? Microsoft should tell the world just how they use it.

This article appeared in Kristian de Lillo’s e-magazine, The CDoC Files.