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If someone buys a domain and decides to redirect or forward it to my site without permission, is there anything legally that I can do to stop them?

Is there a crime they can be charged with? Can I sue them?

I understand there are ways of stopping redirects programmatically so I'm not looking for advice on that.

From what I can tell, it seems to be a bit of a gray area. For example, I read recently that antifa.com redirects to Biden's campaign site. Their campaign isn't happy about it but I haven't read about any lawsuits or anything.

Note: I am not looking for legal advice, only information

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  • For the question that covers the technical things that can be done "short of legal action" see: Disallow redirects from another site
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Oct 1, 2020 at 14:06
  • I suppose the URL in question would be considered defamation by most.
    – Merlin -they-them-
    Oct 1, 2020 at 22:47
  • I've added what is hopefully a helpful example for clarification. As you can see, it's debatable on whether that would count as defamation. It seems like if something were to go to court, it would maybe depend on the judge/jury and whether they think that antifa could be perceived as negative or positive
    – Merlin -they-them-
    Oct 2, 2020 at 4:23

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I believe as there is no real laws on the books, that, you can redirect any domain to anywhere you choose as long as it follows the law in regards not ie phishing, spoofing or obvious things like wire fraud which comes back to the aforementioned.

For some owners who have limited hosting resources it can cause errors or crash server dependent on traffic redirected and in those cases if it was not done with intent to cause your site to function improperly one can reach out to the business or web master and ask to be removed.

But on the other hand if you are suffering in regards to SEO and association many search engines have options to disavow urls.

For instance here is a how to from Google on how to do just that.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en

Which I think is the most effective way to see close to immediate response. The reason also being that Google's livelihood if you will is to have the most relevant searches returned and this also hurts their branding and/or services.

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