Although the general public may compare domainers to cybersquatters, the official term cybersquatting only applies to trademark infringement. Legal domainers avoid domain names that infringe on intellectual property and they avoid typosquatting domain names that are similar to intellectual property. Those who are not domainers may compare them to ticket scalpers, but domainers compare themselves to real estate developers selling Internet real estate. Generally, buying up mass amounts of domains is done when they are cheap to buy whereas the second level domains of .ki cost over a thousand dollars and so these domains are rarely snatched up in mass in hopes to resell to someone.

CNET has reported that "Today, cybersquatters have rebranded themselves as "domainers." While an illegal cybersquatter will register names of intellectual property, a domainer will do other things such as automated domain sniping of expired domains, registration of known words, and registering of all domains that are short such as up to four letters.