[Pikamander2]

A client of mine once swapped over to a new domain that was coincidentally one letter away from another major domain. It wasn't an attempt to typosquat or anything nefarious, but Chrome started automatically showing everyone a big scary warning page before entering the site. We looked into appealing it but there was no guarantee of it getting whitelisted in a timely manner, so we ended up canceling the domain migration before they lost too much traffic.

[campbel]

I wonder if it would be a reasonable requirement of registrars to now allow domains to be purchased if they are some edit distance away from existing/active domains. Its fine if Google wants to protect its users, but ideally this would be caught sooner.

[ajsnigrutin]

That would be a pain...

Look at the milka.fr problems... Milka is also a female name over here, and that already proved to be a problem in france. But so are Mirka and Minka so yeah... no domain for them? Also Micka. Oh and mivka is (beach) sand. Want to sell beach sand? It's just one letter away from milka, so no domain for you either.

[account42]

Is it really better if Mirka, Minka and Micka get to pay for a domain but won't be able to use it because the dominant webbrowser shows super scary warnings?

Still seems better to raise the issue as early as possible so they can find a solution (appeal or chose a different domain) before investing into the unusable domain name. It would also mean that the dispute is at a layer (ICANN) where you at least theoretically have some rights instead of at the hands of a megacorporation that thinks the best way to reduce customer support costs is to make it impossible to get support.

[dasil003]

Defining “active” seems like the tricky part