Icio.de Gets Cease And Desist From Yahoo

Yahoo is having a hard time in Europe. According to Comscore Yahoo has a poor 3.2% share of the European search market compared with 18% in the US and 14% worldwide. The FT recently reported that “Yahoo staff have been given until the first quarter of 2008 to revamp the poorly performing parts of its European business – or these will be closed down or sold.”. And it is probably safe to state that the brand Yahoo does not have the best connotations in Germany.

Yahoo’s involvement in the arrest of Wang Xiaoning was a way bigger issue here than in the US (Yahoo puts profit over human rights is probalby one of the first associations you will get from many people), it did not help that they treat all Germans like children who only are allowed to access safe photos on flickr (censorship is a highly likely second association) and stomping on a local little guy will not help them polish their image neither.

alexa: del.icio.us vs. icio.de

Social bookmarking service icio.de recently has received a cease-and-desist order from Yahoo legal for misusing the icio fragment of Yahoo owned del.icio.us. According to gulli he deadline will not allow them to cleanly migrate the service so they might have to shut down.

icio.de is obviously no thread to del.icio.us (see the chart above, in two years only 225,000 bookmarks have been saved – I for instance alone have saved more than 10,000 bookmarks at del.icio.us) and while del.icio.us is a nice domain hack icio means nothing in German and probably just was playfully signifying upon on this domain hack.

Yahoo has all rights to protect its trademark and it probably was a stupid idea to name the site icio.de, but Yahoo is showing bad judgement and behaves like a bull which makes them, well, look like a bull in Germany.

screenshot icio.de

(via)

(This article originally was written for blognation Germany. Since blognation is gone I have reposted it here)