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Google owned duck.com redirects to Google.com. How is this legal?

16 points by ausvisaissues ↗ HN
Here is the DNS information:

https://whois.icann.org/en/lookup?name=duck.com

How can this be legal, since clearly the name is similar to a rival search engine?

12 comments

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detaro
"duck" also is a common english word, and quite far from any of the trademarks or domains owned by DDG. They don't display content that could confuse a user. If this were illegal, a single trademark would block way to many different words.

It's not particularly nice of Google (e.g. they could sell the domain or just leave it pointing to nothing if they don't have fittingly named product/project right now), but it shouldn't be illegal.

mikejb
Preface: I have only little knowledge aboud DNS records. Feel free to correct or add any information.

Here is what 10 minutes on the internet got me:

- According to Wikipedia [0] DDG started 2008

- The whois record shows 1995 as creation date (I assume this is the first time someone registered it back then?)

- According to [1] the Domain changed owners 3 times (since 2002); These records indicate Google bought the domain latest in 2010

- According to [2] DuckDuckGo Traffic 2010 was between 40k-80k quries per day (~0.5 - 1 QPS)

Unfortunately, this doesn't allow (me) to draw a clear conclusion. (If duck.go were bought in 2005 or 2015, it would have been more clear...)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo

[1] http://whoisrequest.com/history/

[2] https://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html

NetStrikeForce
https://web.archive.org/web/20101002183258/http://duck.com/ in October 2010 it still had the website for a software development company.

The redirect was added shortly after in 2010: https://web.archive.org/web/20101203075708/http://www.duck.c...

I don't think there's even malice. They probably bought the domain and "parked" it by doing a 301 to Google.com - that's it.

lucideer
It apparently came to them when they acquired the Duck Corporation[0], but I think it seems slightly naïve to assume no malice in setting up the redirect. Google own many many domains that do not redirect to google.com or similar.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_Corporation

joe563323
The question is not legal its about ethical. Why Google Why ?
Raed667
This has bad-faith written all over it.

I think a court would agree.

type0
This is really unfortunate, it makes duck.co to loose visitors to google.
tw04
This is more than a little bit silly. Duck.com used to be owned by On2 Technologies which made video compression software. Google acquired On2 and got duck.com as part of the deal. It's not like they went out and just bought the domain. And they definitely didn't spend $106 MILLION on a video compression company just to get the domain. This is entirely legal.

http://googlepress.blogspot.com/2009/08/google-to-acquire-on...

https://web.archive.org/web/20080301180912/http://www.duck.c...