Vodafone Hijacks Airtel's Domain Name!?

There are no ethics in business anymore! Those who thought that MNCs in India would be more ethical are smoking pot! Here is an interesting and a distasteful hijacking of the domain by Vodafone of Airtel’s domain name. Type Airtel.com and you will be directed to www.vodafone.es! Domain Squatting in not uncommon but this is a little too cheeky and unprofessional.

Update: Huzaifa Das suggests in a desicritics group email that this is because Vodafone bought out Airtel’s Spain operations. Airtel had won a license to operate in Spain. In the last line, she has a valid point!

Actually , Airtel Spain was founded in 1995 and was awarded a GSM licence in 1995 to offer telecom services in Spain. I believe Vodafone bought them out , hence the redirection to Vodafone spain. If it was domain hijacking, they would have redirected to an Indian website.

Tony on BachelorCooking says:

Vodafone, one of the largest telecom companies in the world, have hijacked the brandname of it largest competitor in India, AIRTEL, by having registered the domain name airtel.com and redirecting it vodafone’s website. Type airtel.com in your browser and it will redirect you to vodafone.es. Even though, domain squatting and hijacking of domain names may not be illegal, Vodafone is sure to get a legal notice from Bharti. Even though I myself am a user of Vodafone, I would not have expected a company of such scale to do such a thing as hijacking its competitor’s domain name. Of course we would have loved to see Microsoft.com being directed to linux.org but that is a different story J