Victoria’s Secret seizes swimsuit domain, again

The lingerie retailer Victoria’s Secret has won a cybersquatting complaint over the domain name victoriasecretswimsuit.com for the second time in as many years.
Judging by the Whois history, it appears that the company lost the domain following the demise of rogue registrar Lead Networks, which lost its accreditation last year.
Victoria’s Secret first secured the domain with an easily won UDRP complaint in May 2009.
An attorney from its outside law firm was subsequently listed as the admin contact, but the registrar of record remained the same – the Indian outfit Lead Networks.
At some time between August and October last year, the Whois contact changed to the current registrant, who’s hiding behind a privacy service.
Probably not coincidentally, that was about the same time as ICANN, having terminated Lead Networks’ accreditation, bulk-transferred all of its domains to Answerable.com.
Lead Networks was placed into receivership in March 2010 following a cybersquatting lawsuit filed by Verizon.
Answerable.com, a Directi business also based in India, was the registrar’s designated successor under ICANN’s policies. It has subsequently changed its name to BigRock.com.
The latest UDRP decision does not explain how Victoria’s Secret managed to lose its registration, but I’d speculate the inter-registrar transfer may have had something to do with it.
When a registrar loses its accreditation the names are transferred to a new registrar but the term of the registration is not extended. If a registrant ignores or does not receive the notifications sent by the gaining registar, they may find they lose their domains.

Comment Tagged: answerable.com, bigrock, directi, ICANN, inter-registrar transfer policy, lead networks, naf, udrp, victoria's secret, victoriasecretswimsuit.com

Thousands of short .co domains available

The .co registry may have sold over a million domains since it launched a year ago, but there may be quite a bit of potentially valuable real estate still available.
.CO Internet said in its registrar newsletter this week that, as of May 31, 51.2% of three-letter domains and 71.1% of three-character combinations were still available.
On the back of the envelope I’m looking at, that works out to about 9,000 three-letter names and about 33,000 three-letter/number domains.
No three-letter domains are available for the basic registration fee in .com.
Three-letter domains are often considered fairly safe investments by domainers, from a cybersquatting risk perspective, but UDRP panelists don’t always agree.
UPDATE: In response to a few skeptical reader comments, I pinged .CO for clarification. It turns out that the quoted percentages include the seven Spanish IDN characters that .CO allows — á, é, í, ó, ú, ñ, ü.
Domains including these strings would presumably be far less appealing to registrants, and not all .co registrars offer IDN characters.
The number of pure ASCII three-letter domains available in .co is presumably much, much lower than my envelope math suggested.

5 Comments Tagged: .co, .co internet, short domains

ICANN has $750k to advertise new gTLDs

Don’t all rush at once.
ICANN is looking for an advertising agency to help it get the word out about the new generic top-level domains program, but it only has $750,000 to spend.
The organization published a request for proposals last night.
The budget is not much in the advertising world, especially considering that ICANN’s awareness program will have to be global and multilingual to be truly effective.
With such a limited budget, the RFP and accompanying FAQ acknowledges that it will need “creative solutions” from its ad agency.
This is likely to mean a big PR push for advertising equivalent editorial – lots and lots of news stories about new gTLDs.
To an extent, the word is already out by this measure. My standing Google News and Twitter searches for “ICANN” have been going crazy since the gTLD program was approved two weeks ago.
I think it’s fair to say that the vast majority deal of the coverage so far has been either neutral or negative, with much of the focus on potential legal, branding and security problems.
That’s pretty much par for the course in the domain name business, of course.
And ICANN does not necessarily need positive spin – it’s trying to raise awareness of the program’s existence, and negative coverage does that job just as well.
There is, as they say, no such thing as bad publicity.
ICANN’s job of promoting the program is already being done to a large extent by the registries, many of which were investing heavily in media outreach before new gTLDs were approved.

3 Comments Tagged: advertising, ICANN, new gTLDs

Buy a .com in England, go to jail in America?

People who register .com or .net domain names to conduct illegal activity risk extradition to the United States because the domains are managed by an American company.
That’s the startling line reportedly coming from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, which is trying to have the British operator of TVShack.net shipped out to stand trial in the US.
According to reports, 22-year-old student Richard O’Dwyer is fighting extradition to face charges of criminal copyright infringement.
ICE assistant deputy director Erik Barnett told The Guardian that any overseas web site using a .com or .net address to spread pirated material is a legitimate target for prosecution in the States.
The agency has already started shutting down .com and .net sites by seizing their domains, even if the sites in question had been found legal in their own overseas jurisdictions.
It does so by serving a court order to VeriSign, the registry manager, which is based in Virginia. The company is of course obliged to obey the order.
TVShack.net provided links to bootleg movies and TV shows, rather than hosting the content itself. It appears to be a matter of some confusion in the UK whether that behavior is actually illegal or not.
The site reportedly was hosted outside the US, and O’Dwyer never visited the US. The only link was the domain name.
I’m British, but DI is a .com, so I’d like to exercise my (presumed conferred) First Amendment rights to call this scenario utterly insane.
The issue of legal jurisdiction, incidentally, is one that potential new gTLD applicants need to keep in mind when selecting a back-end registry services provider.
Most incumbent providers are based in the US, and while we’ve seen plenty of upstarts emerge in Europe, Asia and Australia, some of those nations sometimes have pretty crazy laws too.

6 Comments Tagged: ice, seizures, tvshack.net, verisign

“Super Lawyers” not famous enough to win gripe site UDRP fights

Three lawyers have failed to win cybersquatting complaints against a blogger who registered domains matching their personal names in order to criticize them.
Gregg Mashberg, Allen Fagin and Joseph Leccese, all attorneys with the international law firm Proskauer Rose, have lost three separate UDRP complaints recently.
Self-professed “investigative blogger” Crystal Cox registered josephleccese.com, allenfagin.com and greggmashberg.com last October, in order to publish a handful of unreadable and potentially defamatory blog posts alleging various forms of criminality.
The three men do not hold registered trademarks matching their names, so were forced to rely upon various awards they have won and media appearances they have made to show common law rights.
All three have apparently been named “Super Lawyers” by something called New York Super Lawyers, for example.
But the three-person WIPO panel which heard all three cases found, in virtually identical decisions, that the lawyers had failed to acquire common law trademark rights to their names.
The decisions read:

The record before the Panel suggests that Complainant is a highly respected, prominent lawyer who is a partner with a major law firm. There is insufficient evidence here that Complainant markets or provides services independently of the Proskauer law firm. Rather, it appears that the Proskauer firm is the platform on which Complainant provides his legal services.

It’s not unusual for a celebrity or public figure to win a UDRP complaint on the basis of their fame, but it appears in this case that the complainants were just not famous enough.

Comment Tagged: proskauer rose, udrp, wipo

Russian firm fined millions over domain land-grab

RU-Center, Russia’s largest domain name registrar, will have to repay 240 million rubles ($8.6 million) for grabbing thousands of domain names and auctioning them during the .РФ landrush.
The company could also be fined up to 75% of its 2009 revenues for breaking competition law, according to a statement from the country’s Federal Antimonopoly Service.
When .РФ was launched by the .ru registry launched last November, it offered domain names on a first-come first-served basis, without the premium landrush period offered by other TLDs.
RU-Center took this opportunity to register 60,000 domains in its own name and sell them off to the highest bidder, essentially bringing the landrush to the registrar level.
Some ccTLD Coordination Center council members, responsible for setting the launch policies, had ownership interests in RU-Center either directly or through family members, according to FAS.
The registrar is currently being acquired by a company called RBC.

1 Comment Tagged: .РФ, cctld coordination center, fas, gaming, ICANN, idns, landrush, new TLDs, ru-center

Shakeup at Go Daddy

Go Daddy has a new boss and new ownership following a deal reportedly worth $2.25 billion.
For the first time in its 14-year history, Bob Parsons will be neither the majority shareholder nor the CEO.
It appears that seasoned technology investment firms KKR, Silver Lake and Technology Crossover Ventures will own, between them, more than half of the domain name registrar.
Very little about the “partnership” was disclosed, including the financial terms. Various media sources valued the deal at $2.25 billion.
It was left to Domain Name Wire to uncover the news that Parsons will actually step aside as CEO to allow COO Warren Adelman to take over.
Parsons will become executive chairman.
A Go Daddy spokesperson said: “Mr. Parsons has said he will be very active in the business, especially in the areas he is most interested, such as marketing.”
She added that “very little will change”.
The spokesperson confirmed that after the deal closes Parsons will no longer be the majority shareholder. He currently owns 78% of Go Daddy, with the remaining 22% allocated to employee stock options.
As DNW reported, 36 employees will cash out for over $1 million each.
I wonder if we’ll see a mini wave of new domain name companies springing up in the Scottsdale area, as a result of newly minted Go Daddy millionaires leaving to launch their own start-ups.

Comment Tagged: go daddy, kkr, silverlake partners, technology crossover ventures

Go Daddy gripe site to shut down

NoDaddy.com, a gripe site dedicated to discussing customer and employee grievances with Go Daddy, is to be shut down by its administrators.
The shutdown coincides with an ownership shakeup at the registrar, which will see Warren Adelman take over as CEO and three big new investors come on board.
NoDaddy administrator “Rohan” wrote:

What started to document the improper suspension of SecLists.Org grew to cover dozens of other GoDaddy scandals including shill bidding on their own domain auctions, improperly blocking users from transferring domains to other registrars, sexual harassment, constant objectification of women, killing elephants for promotional purposes, etc. We’re hopeful that GoDaddy’s new owners will stop these shenanigans.
While our opinions of GoDaddy haven’t changed, we (NoDaddy admins) have decided to move on to focus on our other pursuits. Accordingly, we’ll be shutting down the main site and the forums on July 8. The site had a great run, and we appreciate your participation over the last 4 years!

In recent months, the vast majority of the posts on the forum have been made by a single disgruntled former Go Daddy employee who is currently suing the company for alleged “wage theft”.
The thread about the class action rambles on to some 147 pages and over 2,100 posts, most of which were made by this individual, going by the handle EmployeeClassAction.
Unsurprisingly, this user suspects the administrators were paid off.

4 Comments Tagged: go daddy, nodaddy

DirecTV wins first-ever .so UDRP

The recently relaunched .so top-level domain has seen its first UDRP case. DirecTV, the American satellite TV provider, won its complaint over the domain directv.so.
As you might imagine, it was found by WIPO to be a slam-dunk case of cybersquatting, with the respondent not even bothering to respond.
The domain was registered April 1, the first day .SO Registry opened its doors to general availability.
The registrant merely parked the domain with his registrar, which is enough nowadays to show commercial use and thus bad faith.
It will be interesting to see how badly .so is cybersquatted. It was not a particularly high-profile launch, and it lacks the attractiveness of, say, .co, so I expect we won’t see a great many UDRP cases filed.
.SO Registry, which has GMO Registry as its back-end provider, had pretty much the same trademark protection mechanisms built-in as .co, and used some of the same counsel to create them.
.so is the ccTLD for Somalia.

Comment Tagged: .so, .so registry, directv

Beckstrom gets his bonus again

ICANN president and CEO Rod Beckstrom has been awarded a performance-related bonus for the 12-month period ending today, it has emerged.
The undisclosed amount was approved by the ICANN board of directors during an unannounced meeting last Saturday.
As it is classed as a personal personnel matter, the portion of his “at risk component” approved was not revealed, but it is known that Beckstrom’s annual bonus is capped at $195,000.
His base salary is $750,000.
It’s the second consecutive year that he has received some part of his bonus. For the year ended June 30, 2010, the board voted it through in December.
As Beckstrom enters the third year of his three-year contract, it’s understood that he has already been making overtures to the board to extend his tenure for a second term.

1 Comment Tagged: ICANN, rod beckstrom