5 Comments

You're missing the real incentives for why this happens.

A (Nykaa/PayTM/..) hires B (iZOOlogic) to protect their brand. There's not much work B does, except for running off-the-shelf software, and filing complaints on behalf of A. This would include legitimate takedowns (say phishing websites to fool A customers), domain-impersonations, or a lot of fair-use stuff that the companies might not want (Domain registrations for A.sucks).

Every quarter, B has to go and charge A for an invoice, and the invoice has to _show some numbers_. The contract goes away unless they actually do some "brand protection". Filing silly DMCA notices is the easiest way to pad these numbers, so that's what B ends up doing.

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Very good point. I didn't think of it in this way.

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This is the kind of internet that I fell in love with in my teenage. Thanks for these posts man. Just binged all your articles.

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Thank you for bringing some gold from the forgotten corners of the internet! Love and really look forward to all the newsletters you send out! It's really fun.

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I was sent a public service video by a friend on signal in which a policeman talks about cyber crime. In the video he goes on to talk about how the victim was fooled into believing he had won a lottery etc and interestingly two of the websites he mentions in passing of having fake sites etc was meesho and nyka as far as I remember. I wonder if that fits in to this puzzle 🤔😅

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