Should We Worry About a New Form of Typosquatting?

It's becoming easier to start registering domains with typos -- but not the kind you'd expect with a little extra letter here and there. It starts out with a discovery from pageoneresults:

With the approval of IDNs recently and now the testing phase, I do believe we as Internet Marketers and Webmasters are going to be faced with a new level of search sabotage and phishing that makes the current methods look like amateur stuff.

By using special characters in the URL, which is becoming increasingly possible now, one is able to register domain names never thought to exist, such as www.pàypal.com (note the accent over the a).

It seems that a number of people are looking to monetize on these domain names. They're putting them up for sale and hoping that the rightful domain name owners claim them.

While it's still relatively new and we're not sure how long this will last, one thing is certain that it's time to start educating website owners about the potential dangers of this version of typosquatting.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.