Google Getting Careless with Branding
Posted by jonathan at 9:19am EST on 01/28/2009
Google is a company that I would expect to protect its brand, trademark, and copyright, but in a few cases, I have seen that they haven’t been very protective.
The first instance is GOOGLE.vc. This website is not owned by Google.
I’ve talked about this domain before and mentioned it to a number of Google employees, but yet, Google still hasn’t done anything about it. Google owns thousands of domains. Heh, Google is even an accredited registrar, but they have never registered a single domain.
Google uses MarkMonitor.com to registered all of their domains and monitor new extensions. But MarkMonitor did not catch this one, Google.vc is owned by someone else.
But this is not the only case where Google is not protecting their brand.
There are a few well known companies that protect their brand like it’s no body else’s business, specifically Dell. Dell Inc. will go to great lengths to protect their brand, trademarks, and copyrights, all across the world. In my personal opinion, Google doesn’t be so strict as Dell, but they ought to have a lot more grasp of their brand than they presently have.
Let’s look at YouTubeIslam.com, another brand that is not being protected.
In case you hadn’t noticed, YouTube.com has grown to become one of the top five search engines in the world. Not just a video site anymore, but also a huge search engine.
YouTubeIslam.com is blatantly violating YouTube’s trademark, but Google is doing nothing about it. The domain has been registered for two years now, but still, it’s still operational.
All this to say, I would have hoped Google would have a tighter reign on its brand. I feel Google has been very careless with letting even just these two domains exist and infringe upon its trademark and reputation. I say reputation because YouTube and Google have built up the name of YouTube and YouTubeIslam.com is banking on that reputation to garner more traffic to their site. It’s wrong.
Incoming search terms:
- this website is not owned by google
- youtube ислам
naterkane
Jan 28th, 2009
Do you have any ideas as to why they might not be protecting their brand from properties like YouTubeIslam?
I’m thinking that simply due to the political climate they may look at going after YouTubeIslam as being a political risk that’s not worth the reward. The potential for negative spin in a case where a giant US corporation attacks a small company branded with the religious affiliation of 1/3 of the world is incredible. Maybe leaving it alone is doing more to protect their brand in a holistic way than doing anything else would.
Jonathan Dingman
Jan 28th, 2009
Nater,
There is definitely that spin of politics and religion to it, but I really feel that Google should do more to protect their brand. They’ve spent too much time and money to build a brand, only to not care that someone is banking off of it. It just doesn’t make sense to me.