Reglikedomain industry desk

Gets defensive with domains for spin-off CEO — Abbott Laboratories

Firm registers “sucks” domains and others for fresh pharma unit CEO Richard Gonzalez.

Abbott Laboratories is splitting into two this year, and Richard A. Gonzalez will be the CEO of its pharmaceuticals unit.

As a number of firms do for their senior leadership, Abbott is making sure you don’t register web addresses to tarnish Gonzalez’ name.

Yesterday the firm registered at least two dozen domain names related to Gonzalez. Some are benign, such as RichardAGonzales.com, but others have greater potential for misuse, such as RichardAGonzalezSucks.com.

It’s also protecting typos such as richardg0nzalez.org (with a zero instead of an ‘o’) and RicardGonzalez.biz (missing the ‘h’).

The firm used Mark Monitor’s DNStination entity to register the domains in secret. Still, it registered the .us version of the names and you can’t use whois privacy on .us domains. The .us whois records clearly show that Abbott Laboratories is the registrant of the domains.

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