Google has won a ruling from the National Arbitration Forum giving it control of several domains which are very similar to its own.

The NAF gave Google control of googkle.com, ghoogle.com, gfoogle.com and gooigle.com which had all been registered by Sergey Gridasov of St Petersburg.

The panel found Gridasov registered the addresses after Google had launched. It ruled the web addresses were confusingly similar to Google's and that Gridasov had no legitimate rights to them and was using them in bad faith by "presumably profiting from them".

The domains sent browsers to web sites which tried to download trojans and spyware. Gridasov did not respond to emails, faxes or letters from the arbitrators. NAF settles domain disputes using Icann's Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy.

More on the NAF website here.®

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