MapQues.com will belong to AoL thanks to arbitration
Mainstream Advertising of Canoga Park, Calif. has been owner of Mapques.com (no T) – until this month, when AoL, Mapquest.com (WITH a T) owner , succeeded in its complaint to the National Arbitration Forum. AoL’s win of the typosquatting case, while it doesn’t note any money changing hands, does leave AoL owner of the domain. The win must be partly attributable to Joseph’s being a no-show regarding the complaint.
The Mainstream Advertising site is secretive as well, with no physical address, a management bios page that lists no bios, a careers page with no jobs, a Web contact form that doesn’t enable contact, and a phone line that fails to name the company. One of the partners listed on the site is, interestingly, AoL. We wondered aloud to both AoL and Nathan Joseph’s voice mails what this partnership was about and how it might be affected by this decision. The MapQues site, another less-than-forthcoming destination, does not seem to have been taken over by AoL as yet. Its mapping offers simply link to various alternating sites such as Smarter.com and CheapStuff.com .
Mainstream is also owner of Ad.com, an advertising network.
We asked AoL what it plans to do with this domain, if anything. We’ll keep you posted. In the meantime, here’s the arbitrated complaint and decision.
