.CM is the top-level domain extension assigned to the country of Cameroon. Just like the Tuvaluan’s with their .TV domain extension from years back, the Cameroonians wanted to make money.
As a money-making scheme, the Cameroonians were allowing some typo-squatters to register names like “google.cm” to capture all the traffic from people who mis-type “google.com” as “google.cm”.
By offering the .cm name to the general public at $350/2-yr (as the starting bid, if two or more people bid on the same domain, the name goes to the highest bidder).
This is nothing short of domain name extortion. They’re essentially saying “your web visitors are stupid and are going to mis-type your domain name, if you don’t buy this new domain name then someone else will steal all your (stupid) customers and send them to your competitors”.
The level of potential impact is limited to those who mistype the .com as .cm, and they are not going to believe they’ve landed on the right site when they hit a page full of links (the current practice), so they’ll hit the back button and try again.
So, skip on this “exclusive offer” if it hits your email box.
