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.shop lawsuit falling to pieces

Kevin Murphy, April 29, 2016, 14:06:10 (UTC), Domain Policy

Commercial Connect’s lawsuit against ICANN appears to be on its way out, as ICANN claims the .shop applicant has “abandoned” the case.
The company sued ICANN in January in an attempt to prevent .shop gTLD being sold off via an ICANN last-resort auction.
It failed, and the auction raised a $41 million winning bid from GMO Registry.
It transpired that the company didn’t bother telling its lawyer that it had signed an agreement not to sue when it applied for .shop, and the lawyer jumped ship less than two weeks after the complaint was filed.
The lawyer told the court the waiver had been “buried among thousands and thousands of documents on a USB drive” and that he hadn’t noticed it before filing the suit.
In a court filing (pdf) yesterday, ICANN said that Commercial Connect had failed to secure a new lawyer, had failed to formally serve ICANN with the complaint, and had missed its April 25 deadline to argue against ICANN’s motion to dismiss the case.
For these reasons, it said, the case should be chucked.
Commercial Connect applied for .shop in 2000 and again in 2012 and has used every appeals mechanism and legal tool at its disposal in order to disrupt competing bids.
GMO’s .shop is currently in pre-delegation testing.

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Comments (2)

  1. Andrew says:

    These guys are a piece of work. How would this not be the first thing you told your lawyer?

  2. Rubens Kuhl says:

    The lawsuit has been closed by the judge, but might be reopened since it was done without prejudice.
    https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/litigation-cc-order-granting-motion-to-dismiss-28apr16-en.pdf

Leave a Reply to Rubens Kuhl