IMO, there won’t be much negative publicity for them to their core base. This will stay a domain industry and maybe an Internet industry issue at most. How many people in this crowd use AOL? I happen to have an AOL account as part of a family account created many years ago. It would be too much effort to change my parents’ usage habits and set up a new email account for them, so I can’t cancel. I would cancel my subscription though if I was a paying customer.

I don’t think AOL has any ground to stand on here. The rights to Ad.com by name association is blurry at best in my opinion. It was poor branding from the beginning if you allow employees to use a nickname for your company that is a domain you don’t own. That is on them. Brand management. The fact is that AOL had every right to bid and win Ad.com at auction and they did not do that.

It’s obvious they thought they could save a few bucks and strong arm the parties involved using the court system. I see that backfiring big for AOL.

I think they’ll end up without Ad.com or rights to it along with some negative publicity.

On the other hand I would be furious at loosing the sale and even worse seeing it drop in value because high and mighty AOL have filed. And that’s based on the presumption that if a handfull of people are calling advertising.com by another name it gives AOL the right to ownership of otherwise a totally generic (dictionary) term. Pah!

That to me is strong grounding for a case against AOL in respect of defamation/loss of revenue. If they are so idiotic to think they can claim this domain, I would totally pull every stop out on the organ and whack them with a $1,000,000 law suit if not more. (In especially if they lost the case)!

Whaddya think?