Was Facebok.com really stolen?

The domain name’s strange history raises questions.
The typo domain facebok.com is currently at the center of an unusual legal battle that has put a respected domain name registrar’s ICANN accreditation at risk.
EuroDNS, as I reported last week, has been handed an ICANN breach notice for failing to transfer the domain to Facebook, which won it in a slam-dunk UDRP complaint last September.
If it does not hand over the domain by May 11, it stands to lose its ability to sell domain names.
But the registrar says it is a defendant in a lawsuit, filed in its native Luxembourg, which has put a jurisdictional question mark over its ability to legally transfer the domain.
According to EuroDNS, the suit was filed by a company calling itself “Facebok.com Inc”, on September 24 last year, just one week after the UDRP case was decided.
This suspiciously named company alleges that the domain is its rightful property, and that it was stolen by the respondent in the UDRP case, one Franz Bauer of Munich, Germany.
The suit names Bauer, Facebook and EuroDNS as defendants.
A review of historical Whois records shows that Bauer has been associated with the domain facebok.com since August 2009, after it emerged from a few years behind a Whois privacy shield.
The address in the Whois, then and now, seems to be a hotel in Munich.
However, on September 21, 2010, a few days after WIPO informed Bauer he had lost the UDRP, the contact information in the Whois changed to a Hushmail email address and:

Company: FACEBOK.COM, INC.
Name: Facebok Domains Facebok Admininstrator
Address: IPASA Building, 3rd Floor, 41 Street Off Balboa Avenue, Bella Vista District
City: Panama City
Country: PANAMA
Postal Code: 83256

That address is shared by Panama Offshore Legal Services, a company that offers corporate formation services to individuals outside of Panama, with the promise of “global asset protection, privacy, investment diversification, tax minimization, affordability and convenience.”
Facebok.com Inc, which is suing EuroDNS, Facebook and Bauer, therefore appears to be an offshore shell company. The question is: who’s behind it?
At the time the domain’s Whois changed from Bauer to Facebok.com Inc, it was in ClientTransferProhibited status, meaning it could not be transferred to another registrar, but that the registrant was free to change his contact information at will.
By early October, the Whois record had reverted back to Bauer.
The domain facebok.com currently directs fat-fingered web surfers to a variety of affiliate scams, depending on where they live, that rely upon users completing spurious surveys and not reading the fine print when they sign up for pricey mobile phone messaging services.
With 500 million Facebook users, many of whom will be youngsters, silver surfers, or may not use ASCII as their primary script, the site is likely to be getting a fair bit of traffic.
Compete.com estimates it received roughly 4,000 to 8,000 visits per month last year. Alexa gives the site a rank of roughly 154,000. Both sites show a huge traffic spike in March.

Niue: the myth of the “Wifi Nation”

The tiny Pacific island of Niue is commonly referred to as the world’s first and only “Wifi Nation”.
There was a lot of feel-good press coverage back in 2003, when the Massachusetts-based manager of the .nu country-code top-level domain started deploying wireless internet on the island.
NU Domain said at the time that it was “building the world’s first nation-wide wifi Internet access service, all at no cost to the public or the local government” (pdf)
This led to major media outlets, such as the BBC, reporting the line: “The free wi-fi link will be accessible to all of Niue’s 2,000 residents as well as tourists and business travellers.”
This story has remained in the media consciousness to this date, encouraged by the registry.
Just this week, NU Domain’s charitable front operation, the IUSN Foundation, was fluffily claiming that it has provided Niue with “the world’s only nation-wide free Internet”.
Even ICANN’s Kiwi chairman, Peter Dengate Thrush, spread the meme during a recent interview (audio), saying Niue had “installed free wifi across the entire island”.
There is just one problem with the “Wifi Nation” story: it’s bollocks.
This is what Niue’s Premier, Toke Talagi, had to say to Australian radio (audio) this week:

The internet services are unreliable, they’re not available throughout the island, and if you do want internet services connected up to your home you have to pay for it. Some people as I understand it have been paying up to $3,000 [$2,400] just for the installation of the wifi.
…
We’re never quite certain about what that “free” internet services is about, because we’ve had to pay.

According to Talagi, the wifi network provided by IUSN does not cover every village on the island, and users have to pay for it. The free wifi nation is neither free nor nationwide.
Even IUSN, while continuing to make its claims about nationwide wifi, admitted a year ago, seven years after the “wifi nation” claims were first made, that “villagers have been waiting to get online for some time”.
According to Talagi, the lack of reliable internet access is such a big problem that the Niuean government has had to take matters into its own hands and build its own ISP.
It is close to completing its own wired and wireless internet infrastructure, at the cost of $4.8 million, according to reports.
Niue discussed its needs with IUSN in 2009 and 2010, Talagi said, but “they felt they didn’t need to discuss these particular matters, that the services they were providing for us were adequate”.
It appears that IUSN doesn’t even pay to maintain its own equipment. This quote comes from a locally produced newsletter dated April 2009:

While IUSN is committed to provide free internet for its residents it is up to the users of this service to look after and maintain the internet enabling facilities.

That came from a report about residents of one of the island’s villages holding a fund-raiser in order to collect the $2,400 required to fix a wifi mast that had been damaged in a lightning storm (a common problem).
The per capita GDP of Niue, incidentally, is $5,800. Its citizens are not starving, but by the measure of its estimated GDP, about $10 million, it’s one of the poorest nations on the planet, reliant heavily on aid from nearby New Zealand.
According to Talagi and other sources, good internet access is not only required for economic reasons such as boosting the tourism industry.
Fast, reliable connectivity would also enable important human services, such as remote video diagnoses to be performed by overseas medical specialists, which the island lacks.
Niue’s ongoing economic problems come about largely because, other than fishing, it has very few natural resources to exploit.
A notable industry in the past has been the export of postage stamps to overseas collectors.
That business made headlines recently when a stamp was issued, celebrating the marriage of Prince William to Kate Middleton, which featured a perforation separating bride and groom.
There’s also talk of setting up a casino on the island, to boost revenues.
One asset it does have, at least on paper, is its top-level domain, .nu, which has proven popular in Sweden, where the word “nu” means “now”.
However, other than the lackluster internet connectivity provided by IUSN, Niue apparently does not see any significant revenue from the sale of .nu domain names.
According to IANA records, the .nu domain is officially delegated to the IUSN Foundation, previously known as the Internet Users Society – Niue.
The technical back-end provider is WorldNames Inc, which also operates as a registry/registrar under the brand NU Domain.
IUSN’s contact address is a PO Box in Niue, probably due to the fact that all ccTLD registry operators have to be based in the country they purport to represent.
The IUSN’s domain name, iusn.org, is registered to the same address as WorldNames and NU Domain, in the leafy Boston suburb of Medford, MA.
Most of the company’s business is done in Sweden, where most of its staff are based.
WorldNames has been in control of .nu since 1997, when its founder, Bill Semich, in partnership with a American ex-pat living on the island, managed to acquire the IANA delegation, pre-ICANN.
By several accounts, Niue has been trying to reclaim .nu from Semich for almost as many years.
In 2003, the government hired an American lawyer, Gerald McClurg, to be its representative on ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee and attempt to secure a redelegation.
That same year, McClurg made a submission to the International Telecommunications Union (.doc), in which he alleged that the nation was tricked out of its domain:

In 1997 IANA, without the approval of the Niuean Government, delegated the ccTLD for Niue to a businessman, William Semich, who lives in the United States. The advisor to the Government at that time was an ex-peace corp volunteer named Richard Saint Clair. Mr Saint Clair told the Government that the name meant nothing, that it was of no value or significance, and there was nothing that could be done. Shortly thereafter, Mr. Saint Clair then left his post as advisor and joined with Mr Semich in his organization – IUSN. The Government of Niue has been working every since to regain its ccTLD.

The Niuean government has actually passed a law, the Communications Amendment Act 2000, which states: “.nu is a National resource for which the prime authority is the Government of Niue”.
It also established the Niue Information Technology Committee, which “shall be the only designated Registry Manager of the Niue ccTLD .nu.”
Yet, eleven years on, IUSN is still the registry manager for .nu.
Talagi said in his radio interview this week that Niue was preparing to submit a redelegation request to ICANN/IANA in February last year, which is in line with what I was hearing at the time.
I have in my possession documentation from a European domain name registrar, dated March 2010, offering to take over the management of .nu on a not-for-profit basis.
It’s not clear to me whether Niue’s redelegation request is still active. Under current IANA practices, ICANN does not discuss pending ccTLD redelegation requests.
But I suspect IUSN has little interest in handing .nu back to Niue.
While registration data is not easy to come by, the number that has been reported frequently over the years, and as recently as 2008, is 200,000.
At 30 euros ($44) per year for the standard service from NU Domain, that’s close to a $9 million business just from domain registration fees.
That may not be much on the grand scheme of things, but it would certainly be material to a nation so reliant on hand-outs as Niue.
But IUSN is very protective of its asset.
Take a look at the Accountability Framework – one of the methods by which ICANN establishes formal relationships with ccTLD managers – that IUSN and ICANN signed in 2008 (pdf).
ICANN has signed 26 Accountability Frameworks over the last five years. They’re all very similarly worded, but the one it signed with IUSN has a notable addition not found in any of the others.
All ccTLDs’ Accountability Frameworks call for the TLD to be managed “in a manner that is consistent with the relevant laws of [insert country name]”.
But the .nu agreement is the only one to also make a specific reference to RFC 1591 and ICP-1, two rules dating from the 1990s that govern how ccTLDs are redelegated from one organization to another.
While ICP-1 gives governments a significant voice in redelegation requests, both documents state that IANA should only redelegate a TLD when both the winning and losing parties agree to the transfer.
The only notable exception to the rule is when the incumbent registry manager has been found to have “substantially misbehaved”, which I understand to be quite a high bar.
With that in mind, it’s far from obvious whether Niue stands any chance of getting its ccTLD redelegated to an approved registry any time soon.
According to a recent report (pdf) from ICANN’s ccNSO, IANA has redelegated ccTLDs in cases where the losing registry fought the decision, but its procedures for doing so are utterly opaque.

ICE domain seizures enter second phase

The US Immigration & Customs Enforcement agency seems to be consolidating its portfolio of seized domain names by transferring them to its own registrar account.
Many domains ICE recently seized at the registry level under Operation “In Our Sites” have, as of yesterday, started naming the agency as the official registrant in the Whois database.
ICE, part of the Department of Homeland Security, has collected over 100 domains, most of them .coms, as part of the anti-counterfeiting operation it kicked off with gusto last November.
The domains all allegedly either promoted counterfeit physical goods or offered links to bootleg digital content.
At a technical level, ICE originally assumed control of the domains by instructing registries such as VeriSign, the .com operator, to change the authoritative name servers for each domain to seizedservers.com.
All the domains pointed to that server, which is controlled by ICE, resolve to a web server displaying the same image:

(The banner, incidentally, appears to have been updated this month. If clicked, it now sends visitors to this anti-piracy public service announcement hosted at YouTube.)
Until this week, the Whois record associated with each domain continued to list the original registrant – a great many of them apparently Chinese – but ICE now seems to be consolidating its portfolio.
As of yesterday, a sizable chunk — but by no means all — of the seized domains have been transferred to Network Solutions and now name ICE as the registrant in their Whois database records.
Rather than simply commandeering the domains, it appears that ICE now “owns” them too.
But ICE has already allowed one of its seizures to expire. The registration for silkscarf-shop.com expired in March, and it no longer points to seizedservers.com or displays the ICE piracy warning.
The domain is now listed in Redemption Period status, meaning it is starting along the road to ultimately dropping and becoming available for registration again.
Interestingly, most of the newly moved domains appear to have been transferred into NetSol from original registrars based in China, such as HiChina, Xin Net and dns.com.cn.
After consulting with a few people more intimately familiar with the grubby innards of the inter-registrar transfer process than I am, I understand that the names could have been moved without the explicit intervention of either registrar, but that it would not be entirely unprecedented if the transfers had been handled manually under the authority of a court order.
If I find out for sure, I’ll provide an update.

Man writes to ICANN with Whois look-up

A second person has asked ICANN for “a list of all registered domains”, using the organization’s freedom of information policy.
Jorge Sabate made a Documentary Information Disclosure Policy filing (pdf) last December, published this week, in which he made the request. He added:

If you are unable to provide the whole information, i would like to know the dste [date] was created the domain name christiansmith.com

That’s right. Sabate’s method of doing a Whois look-up on a single domain name appears to involve asking ICANN for a database of all 200 million registered domain names.
He’s not the first person to use the DIDP to make such a strange request. One Barry Carter asked for the same list last September, and was similarly unsuccessful.
No such database exists, of course, so ICANN had to rebuff both men.
But to answer your question, Mr Sabate: christiansmith.com was originally registered November 13, 1998.

.xxx introduces the 48-hour UDRP

The forthcoming .xxx top-level domain will have some of the strictest abuse policies yet, including a super-fast alternative to the UDRP for cybersquatting cases.
With ICM Registry likely to sign its registry contract with ICANN soon, I thought I’d take another look at some of its planned policies.
I’d almost forgotten how tight they were.
Don’t expect much privacy
ICM plans to verify your identity before you register a .xxx domain.
While the details of how this will be carried out have not yet been revealed, I expect the company to turn to third-party sources to verify that the details entered into the Whois match a real person.
Registrants will also have to verify their email addresses and have their IP addresses recorded.
Whois privacy/proxy services offered by registrars will have to be pre-approved by ICM, “limited to services that have demonstrated responsible and responsive business practices”.
Registrants using such services will still have their full verified details stored by the registry, in contrast to TLDs such as .com, where the true identity of a registrant is only known to the proxy service.
None of these measures are foolproof, of course, but they would raise barriers to cybersquatting not found in other TLDs.
Really rapid suspension
The .xxx domain will of course abide by the UDRP when it comes to cybersquatting complaints, but it is planning another, far more Draconian suspension policy called Rapid Takedown.
Noting that “the majority of UDRP cases involve obvious variants of well-known trademarks”, ICM says it “does not believe that the clearest cases of abusive domain registration require the expense and time involved in traditional UDRP filings.”
The Rapid Takedown policy is modeled on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Trademark holders will be able to make a cybersquatting complaint and have it heard within 48 hours.
Complaints will comprise a “simple statement of a claim involving a well-known or otherwise inherently distinctive mark and a domain name for which no conceivable good faith basis exists”.
A “response team” of UDRP panelists will decide on that basis whether to suspend the domain, although it does not appear that ownership will be transferred as a result.
X strikes and you’re out
ICM plans to disqualify repeat cybersquatters from holding any .xxx domains, whether all their domains infringe trademarks or not.
The policy is not fully fleshed out, so it’s not yet clear how many infringing domains you’d have to own before you lose your .xxx privileges.
High-volume domain investors would therefore be advised to make sure they have clean portfolios, or risk losing their whole investment.
Gaming restrictions
ICM plans to allow IP rights holders to buy long-term, deep-discount registrations for non-resolving .xxx domains. As I’ve written before, Disney doesn’t necessarily want disney.xxx to point anywhere.
That would obviously appeal to volume speculators who don’t fancy the $60-a-year registry fee, so the company plans to create a policy stating that non-resolving domains will not be able to convert to normal domains.
There’s also going to be something called the Charter Eligibility Dispute Resolution Process, which which “will be available to challenge any resolving registration to an entity that is not qualified to register a resolving name in the .xxx TLD”.
This seems to suggest that somebody (think: a well-funded church) who does not identify as a member of the porn industry would be at risk of losing their .xxx domains.
The CEDRP, like most of the abuse policies the registry is planning, has not yet been fully fleshed out.
I’m told ICM is working on that at the moment. In the meantime, its policy plans are outlined in this PDF.

Facebook files 21 domain name complaints

Facebook has filed a UDRP complaint covering 21 domain names that include its trademark.
All seem to belong to the same domainer: Mike Mann. His company, Domain Asset Holdings, which has over 162,000 domains to its name, is listed in the Whois for each.
It’s the largest single UDRP filing by Facebook to date, and only its second to include brand+keyword domains.
The contested domains include: aboutfacebook.com, facebookbabes.com, facebookcheats.com, facebookclub.com, facebookdevelopment.com, killfacebook.com and many more.
All 21 covered by the UDRP are currently available for sale at Mann’s DomainMarket.com, with list prices between $350 and $8,000 and above.
A quick search on that site for other well-known social media brands returned dozens of results.
Mann is known as co-founder of BuyDomains, and more recently as one of the former owners of sex.com, which sold for $13 million last year.

ICANN to skip stakeholders for more GAC talks

ICANN stakeholder groups will miss out on their usual formal sit-down with the board of directors at the San Francisco meeting next week, due to talks between the board and governments.
ICANN has confirmed the touted second day of Governmental Advisory Committee consultations, centering on new top-level domains and .xxx, for next Tuesday.
Tuesdays at ICANN meetings are informally referred to as Constituency Day, where the various interest groups that make up the “bottom” of ICANN’s policy-making process meet up.
Usually, the board moves between these meetings, gathering feedback on policy issues from stakeholders such as registrars, registries, ISPs, IP owners and non-commercial users.
According to some attendees, that won’t happen in San Francisco.
ICANN staff will still attend the constituency sessions, but the GAC consultation will take up the board’s undivided attention.
It make perfect sense, of course. There are only so many hours in the day, only so many days in the week, and ICANN is eager to put work on the new TLD program to bed as soon as possible.
But that logic is unlikely to prevent grumblings from some stakeholders.

dotMusic buys music.co

Constantine Roussos of dotMusic, which plans to apply for the .music top-level domain, has added to his collection of musical domain names with the purchase of music.co.
Roussos, who already owns music.us and music.biz, seems to have been the winning bidder, paying $30,000, when it was auctioned by Sedo late last month, but Whois records did not change until this Monday.
Remarkably, Music.co is already developed. It lets you play from a selection of godawful* music from an artist calling himself “Constantine”, including one track called “.music”.
The domain was previously owned by domainer Mike Mann, who snapped up dozens of premium generic terms in the .com.co namespace a few years ago in order to be grandfathered in when .co relaunched.
Roussos’ dotMusic initiative is currently the only applicant for the .music TLD to have gone public.
Of the other big sales from the Sedo auction, shop.co is now owned by a German search engine, Websuche, and pizza.co was sold to a California-based developer of discount codes web sites.
The domain download.co, which sold for $10,099, now redirects to what appears to be an affiliate marketing site for software called “Driver Detective”, which I was too scared to install.
Many of the other sales appear to have been made to other domainers.
(* I’m kidding. Probably.)

Start-up plans .bank and .secure TLDs

The first applicant for “.bank” and “.secure” top-level domains has revealed itself.
Domain Security Company, a start-up based in Wisconsin, is behind the proposals. It’s currently seeking funding for the applications, according to its web site.
The firm says it will offer security via a mix of “technical innovations, process improvements, and enhanced requirements”.
Its intention to obtain .secure and .bank seems to have first emerged when it filed for a US trademark registration on both TLDs last September.
The company’s domain name – interestingly, it’s a .co – is registered to entrepreneur Mary Iqbal of Asif LLC, a frequent participant in ICANN policy-making.
I think I’m on record as saying I think .secure is an incredibly risky proposition, the equivalent of painting a giant target on your back. Nothing on the internet is truly secure, and a TLD that says otherwise is a bold statement that invites trouble.
I think it’s also fair to say that unless Domain Security Company manages to secure the support of the world’s leading financial institutions, it will face an extremely tough fight to win .bank.
The Financial Services Roundtable’s technology arm, BITS, has taken a strong view on .bank, and is drafting security guidelines it hopes will be used by applicants.
And ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee still wants TLDs including .bank to be subject to a higher level of community support before they are approved.
It’s possible that .secure will be contested. Another site seems to have a similar idea.

Xvid founder tries to seize $55k sale Xvid.com

The founder of Xvid.org, a popular if legally dubious video codec, is trying to get his hands on the domain name Xvid.com.
Michael Militzer, who launched the Xvid project in 2001, has filed a UDRP complaint with the World Intellectual Property Organization.
Xvid.com was registered in 2000, and spent much of the last decade as a placeholder site, but changed hands early last year. It’s now developed, with links to video software.
In a thread on DigitalPoint, it is claimed that the current registrant paid $55,000 for the domain. It may prove to have been a poor investment.
There’s plenty of UDRP precedent suggesting that buying a domain name corresponding to a trademark can be considered bad faith, even when the original registration preceded the trademark filing.
Millitzer obtained his US trademark on the word “Xvid” in 2008. Historical Whois records show the domain has only been registered to its current owner since 2010.
There’s an irony here: Xvid has been accused in the past of infringing intellectual property rights in the form of MPEG’s patents.