I've made the point before, but it's worth pointing out again that this is just typosquatting on a massive scale.
Many people don't realize that there's TONS of traffic going to typo domains (whether registered or not). For instance, youtuve.com (notice the v instead of the b) got 347,852 visitors over the last 31 days. It redirects to another domain for cloaking purposes, but here is the
traffic report. This level of traffic provides the financial incentive to implement these DNS schemes.
By the way, there's a new, free
typosquatting scan tool at aliasencore.com. It shows you all the registered
.COM domain names that are one character misspellings of any Alexa top 100,000 site you enter. It also displays screenshots of those typosquatting sites. It's a nifty way to get a quick idea of the rampant growth of typosquatting.
Here's an example that shows the 425 registered
.COM domain names that are one character away from google.com.
Full disclosure: I am Graham MacRobie, the CEO of Alias Encore, Inc. We help companies recover cybersquatting domain names, but we focus solely on "slam-dunk" typosquatting cases (obviously only registered domain names). I can speak from personal experience in this field that the very last thing we need is wholesale typosquatting at the DNS level. Bell Canada should turn this "feature" off immediately.