Cybersquatting is as much of a pain in the brand name as ever, but Verizon has been awarded what it calls the "largest-ever judgment" against OnlineNIC, a company squatting hundreds of domains related to Verizon products. Verizon is set to collect $33.15 million from OnlineNIC—if anyone from the company can be found.

OnlineNIC is a domain registrar based in San Francisco that, according to Verizon's 480+ page complaint filed in June, has made a business out of registering over 600 domain names like iphonefromverizon.com, itunesverizon.com, and treoverizon.com. Since no one from the "accredited" OnlineNIC appeared to court summons, the court "concluded that OnlineNIC's bad-faith registrations of Verizon-related domain names were designed to attract web users who were seeking to access Verizon's legitimate websites," Verizon said in a lawsuit.

The telecom won a default judgement against OnlineNIC for $50,000 per domain name that OnlineNIC registered, and both Microsoft and Yahoo filed their own similar lawsuits later this year.

Verizon Vice President Sarah Deutsch displayed an affinity for the theatrical in the company's statement, declaring that "this case should send a clear message and serve to deter cybersquatters who continue to run businesses for the primary purpose of misleading consumers."

According to Verizon's lawsuit, however, it may have trouble striking fear into the knees of cybersquatters everywhere since OnlineNIC's perpetrators employees have gone to great lengths to conceal their identities. OnlineNIC's employees have used "numerous shell-entities, fictitious business, and personal names," in addition to covering basic tracks such as withholding accurate information from the company's public WHOIS database. Verizon believes that one or more of OnlineNIC's employees conduct business with various aliases and contact information, including "dehau manglang ciqi CO., LTD.," "txt@yogidesigns.com," and "DN4Ever."

Regardless of the whereabouts of OnlineNIC's one-or-more employees, the World Intellectual Property Organization said in March that cybersquatters are on the rise. In 2007, it received 2,156 complaints over cybersquatting—almost a 50 percent increase from two years ago—and ICANN's plan to introduce new generic Top Level Domains (gTLDs like .com, .net, etc.) will almost surely make matters worse. Instead of having to protect against derivative .com domains like the ones that OnlineNIC registered, Verizon may soon need to register domains like http://phones.verizon and plans.vzw; the sky could truly be the limit.