The headline at TechCrunch says it all: “AOL Thinks It Owns All Advertising Domains”. The company is not only partly responsible for the $1.4 million sale of Ad.com falling through, but it is now suing Advertise.com for trademark infringement and unfair competition based on the domain name similarities to AOL-owned Advertising.com.

As reported at Domain Name Wire, the lawsuit claims:

“…Advertise.com recently commenced use of the virtually identical and confusingly similar designation Advertise.com and design in connection with the same and complimentary services as those offered by Plaintiffs under their federally-registered Advertising.com name and marks and their Ad.com name and marks.”

AOL believes that this could cause confusion for anybody who thinks Advertise.com is affiliated with AOL’s Advertising.com or Ad.com trademarks. The Ad.com mark, by the way, is not based on AOL’s ownership of the domain name (which it has never owned), but rather related to the company calling the Advertising.com unit “Ad.com” in the past.

In the court filings, AOL orders Advertise.com to pay for damages, gains, profits, advantages, and costs… plus “change its corporate and legal name to one that does not incorporate the term ADVERTISE.COM, ADVERTISING.COM, AD.COM or any term confusingly similar thereto”.

And remember, AOL doesn’t own Ad.com or any trademarks directly related to Advertise.com. Bizaare.

[via TechCrunch]

With all that’s happened with Yahoo! recently, this may come as no surprise, but Jerry Yang has stepped down as CEO. Yang, who co-founded the company in 1995, has come under a great deal of criticism in recent months, most notably for turning down Microsoft’s $47.5 Billion dollar buy-out proposal (almost 3x what the company is now worth).

Yahoo remains in a very vulnerable position as their market cap plummets , the Google-proposed ad partnership has reportedly disappeared . There have also been no new developments coming from the rumored AOL deal and Yang’s departure could signal the end of that possibility.  Yang’s decision is better late than never, but in this economy it will take a lot of work to get the company back where it was just months earlier.  With the close connection domainers have to Yahoo, this is important news. Hopefully this move is a sign that the company is making a turn around.