Acouple of weeks ago, Sarah Deutsch got a typical call. The associate general counsel at spoke to a lawyer friend who informed her that someone was selling the internet address Verizonwirelessstorm.com on eBay for $1m. For Ms Deutsch and her team of five trademark lawyers, it triggered another weary process of trying to track down the seller and reclaim the web name.

“We get reports of thousands of violations each day and it is difficult to prioritise which ones we go after,” she says.

Verizon, the US telecommunications operator, owns a portfolio of 10,000 domain names, everything from the obvious verizon.com to misspellings such as verison.com and names such as verizonsucks.com, which they would prefer to keep out the hands of mischief-makers or competitors. This is typical for large companies, for example, owns more than 24,000 domain names.