(November 29) – “Two bitter rivals in the brokerage business have found some common ground on the Internet,” write Peter Edmonston and Charles Gasparino in today’s Wall Street Journal.

“Well, kind of.”

“Merrill Lynch & Co., which is locked in a battle for investors with cross-country competitor Charles Schwab Corp., raised eyebrows on Wall Street by taking the unusual step of registering this Internet address: merrilllynchschwab.com.”

“Don’t get all worked up. It isn’t a sign of a merger or a Web-based joint venture between New York-based Merrill and San Francisco-based Schwab, according to Wall Street executives. Instead, people at Merrill say, it’s merely an effort to protect Merrill’s good name from “cybersquatters,” people who register the company’s name in an Internet address, often in a bid to sell the name back to the company for profit.”

“Merrill says it nabs between 15 and 20 cybersquatters a week. In the past, cybersquatters were known to make a few bucks selling the names back to big companies. But these days, most of them give up without a fight, thanks to a 1999 law in which cybersquatters may be forced to pay as much as $100,000 in damages for bad-faith registration of Web-site names.”

“In this case, Merrill says its legal department came across the name about a month or two ago, when the firm’s domain-name watching service — Cyveillance — discovered the Web site was registered to an individual. The firm declined to provide details about the individual.”

” ‘We go after cybersquatters under the auspices of the cybersquatting laws,’ Merrill spokesman Paul Critchlow says. ‘We demand that whoever put the name to use must stop and transfer it to Merrill for safekeeping.’ “

“Mr. Critchlow plays down any broader significance to the Merrill-Schwab domain name, though he said that the firm will soon be placing a call to Schwab to fill them in about the matter. ‘We would work with Schwab to make sure they’re protected too,’ he adds. A Schwab spokesman declines to comment.”