X-no-Archive:yes
A .com may reserve .org or vice versa to keep their lives simpler, with no
intention of ever actually using it. As I understand it, there is an
importance difference between registering a domain name and actually using
it. The fact that variation of a domain name is registered means less than
one might assume.

Not to pick on Stan and company, but just to follow up with his example: had
Allegro registered allegro.net but never put up a site with that name, they
could expect that users might try allegro.net, fail, and hope that users
have the sense to try .com. Or, they could use www.allegro.net to point to
www.allegro.com, or have the former mirror the latter. But had they
registered it, they would never get traffic from allegro.net meant for some
other company called allegro.

There is precedence in this with toll free numbers, with companies acquiring
numbers similar to their intended number, representing common dialing
mistakes, to prevent that number from being used, especially by a competitor
(which has resulted in court cases). There is also precedence in
intellectual property laws for a company copyrighting / patenting /
trade-marking something in common use, without ever enforcing their 'right'
to this thing, in order to stay out of court should some clever fellow
decide to acquire the rights and then try to sue them for damages. So a few
years ago, IBM copyrighted YEAR2000, only to prevent problems later from
someone claiming that they owned that combination of letters, numbers and
case, for an investment of a few minutes time of some third-tier clerk.
Whereas I have read of a Y2K Investing or something like that, suing others
using Y2K and working in the world of finances, even if the latter is doing
Y2K remediation for financial firms.

Greg Stigers
http://www.cgiusa.com