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France seizes france.com from man who's had it since 1994
- dingaling 8y agoSo the case came down to violating French trademark law. That's because country names cannot be trademarked internationally ( and why tourist agencies register names like Visit<country> ) So it's not clear why Web.com even responded to the complaint unless they have a presence in France. Or was the risk that it could have been escalated to a European level of penalty?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- cornholio 8y agoIf country names cannot be trademarked, that makes the french government's case even weaker, according to WIPO rules - the international body tasked with untangling domain name disputes that fall outside national jurisdiction, like the .com hierarchy. Using a domain name in bad faith against an established trademark are both necessary conditions to seize a domain name. If the term is generic, it cannot be trademarked. There is also beyond dispute that it was used in good faith.
- johnchristopher 8y agoI haven't seen this mentioned yet in the thread but France.fr is a relatively new website for the promotion of tourism in France. Big part of their prospects is worlwide.
- tripletao 8y agoThat part of the story seems severely underexplained to me. Web.com doesn't seem to have any marketing content not in English, so their EU business is probably small compared to this reputational hit. Concern that France would eventually get to them through their payment processors and banks, if the EU takes its cue from the USA in applying extraterritorial law? (Link to GDPR enforcement debate here...) I guess this means we should all ask our registrars what countries' court orders they'll abide by? What happens if Maduro has a Venezuelan court order seizing DolarToday.com?
- casefields 8y agoIt's because someone screwed up big time and when journalists started calling their lawyers told them to shut up.
- zouhair 8y agoSo if France Gall[0] created the website she would have been stripped too? France is a relatively common name[1] in France. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/France_Gall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/France_Gall [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/France_(name) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/France_(name)
- xaldir 8y agoThere is a famous precedent with milka.fr https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milka_contre_Kraft_Foods https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milka_contre_Kraft_Foods tldr : a woman named Milka bought the domain for her own business and used it for a while before Kraft foods noticed it. Lawsuit followed, big business won.
- breakingcups 8y agoAnd nissan.com In this case, big business hasn't won yet: http://www.digest.com/Big_Story.php http://www.digest.com/Big_Story.php
- dade_ 8y agoWeb.com transfers the france.com they registered for their customer (since 1994) to the government of France without explanation or warning. "on March 12, 2018, Web.com abruptly transferred ownership of the domain to the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The company did so without any formal notification to Frydman and no compensation." It is actually just another example proving the warning we have all known/given for years about SaaS / cloud providers owning your digital properties.
- indigodaddy 8y agoYeah, I think as soon as he heard any sort of rumblings from those French entities, he would have been smart to transfer away from web.com to a real/first-party registrar. Potentially they would have been less likely to just hand over the domain.
- cft 8y agoCan you recommend such a registrar? I also had bad experience with Network Solutions / web.com. They seem to blur the distinction between being a hosting company and a domain registrar.
- justinclift 8y agoeasyDNS (easydns.com), based in Canada, has a reputation for not just rolling over. Their UI though is a bit crappy compared to other places though (like hover). Hover though I suspect wouldn't put up any kind of resistance.
- gremlinsinc 8y agoI don't think namesilo would do this, they're highly respected, 8.50 .com's, and free domain privacy.
- testplzignore 8y agoI'm wondering if anything legally prevents Verisign or a registrar from saying "screw it, we're selling every domain name under our control and then shutting down our business." The total assets of Verisign and all of the .com registrars are surely far less than the value of all of the .com domains. Heck, the value of the FANG domains alone is probably worth more than all registrars combined. If Verisign transferred technical control of all .com domains to another party, I guess that would effectively result in a fork of the entire DNS system, assuming the rest of the root name server operators didn't go along with it. But could Verisign legally get away with it? In the france.com case, presumably the owner of the domain was paying Web.com for the domain, and they allegedly received no compensation from Web.com when it was transferred. Seems like a pretty blatant breach of contract to me. Why isn't Web.com being sued? Suing them indirectly via Verisign doesn't make sense.
- scriptproof 8y agohttps://www.icann.org/resources/country-territory-names https://www.icann.org/resources/country-territory-names I have read the entire judgement and beside the fact you can not register the name of a country, he had not also the right to register a trademark from the beginning.
- kriffo 8y agoICANN was formed in 98. He bought the site in 94.
- detaro 8y agoThe page you link talks about agreements for the New gTLDs, and as far as I know the contract for .com has not been amended to match this, so it does not apply to France.com. The trademark angle of course isn't changed by that.
- djrogers 8y agoWait a sec, “France” is a trademark?
- jkaplowitz 8y agoIt certainly could be a trademark, just not an exclusive one like Coca-Cola. If you wanted to market a "France" brand of chairs in the US, that'd be allowed most likely, but wouldn't prevent a "France" brand of dish towels from being registered by someone else. You'd still need to avoid a false impression of origin for your chairs, but it could work if they're actually from France, you provide an alternate association for the word France in your context ("From Mr. France himself, your Kentucky neighbor since 1993!"), or just include in your branding/advertising enough clarity on where the chairs are from.
- rrix2 8y agoFTA: > Defendants knew that they did not, and do not, have a right to the word "France," as evidenced by Defendant Atout France's US Trademark Registration No. 4027580, filed in 2009, in which Defendant expressly disclaimed the exclusive right to the word "France."
- jsjohnst 8y agoTangential to the core issue, but seems kinda weird to me that he claims he bought it from web.com in 1994 and he’s had the domain for 24 years when web.com has only existed for 19. A quick Wikipedia search would’ve clearly shown this. Further, in 1994, there’s only one place he could’ve registered this domain as it wasn’t decentralized until the late 90s. I guess Ars was sleeping at the wheel when posting this.
- lkrubner 8y agoNetwork Solutions was started in 1994, and was later bought by Web.com. It is correct to say that he got a domain name from a registrar which is now the property of Web.com.
- jsjohnst 8y agoYes, but he wasn’t a Web.com customer for 24 years. Web.com didn’t exist until 1999 and further didn’t buy Network Solutions until 2011. It’s fine for a consumer to not remember, but Ars should do better in their reporting!
- nodesocket 8y agoYou can see some historical domain data using SecurityTrails: https://securitytrails.com/domain/France.com/whois https://securitytrails.com/domain/France.com/whois Showing Network Solutions for a long time then switched to OVH in March.
- jsjohnst 8y agoCorrect, I saw that. Network Solutions wasn’t bought by Web.com until 2011, and had Ars fact checked via a quick Wikipedia search they’d know this too. I don’t fault the owner (former I guess) of France.com, I fault Ars for not doing basic fact checking.
- onetimemanytime 8y agoI think he will win according to US law. At least there's no bad faith, simply a site about "France"
- mr_toad 8y agoI doubt he’ll get anywhere by suing the French government. They’ll either just ignore him, or assert sovereign immunity. He’d probably have better luck suing web.com or the new registrar in a US court and forcing them to hand it back.
- onetimemanytime 8y agoI think a Fed judge can order--US based--Verisign to transfer the name back. At least they were able to...
- lkrubner 8y agoThe courts, in the USA, have found that domain names are not property, instead they are like telephone numbers: ---------------- The court found that under the California tariffs, rules, and regulations applicable to public utilities, and under the terms of the contracts, the debtors had no “proprietary right in the number.” https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=0a84b472-c89f-4e06-be1a-93161aa35804 https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=0a84b472-c89f... Also: ...under Virginia law, the user of a telephone number or domain name does not have a property interest in that phone number or domain name. ------------------- Governments have the right to assign to themselves any telephone number they wish, and reserve ranges of phone numbers for themselves, therefore it makes sense that they can do the same to domain names. If people felt strongly about this issue, the law could be changed, but as of right now, under current law, this does not appear to be theft.
- onetimemanytime 8y agoNot all courts, IIRC. The Virginia case was based on VA state law. The 9th and 2nd rules that phone numbers are not assets...so maybe domains are like phone numbers?
- lkrubner 8y agoThat is exactly what I said. Did you read what I wrote? Phone numbers are not assets...so maybe domains are like phone numbers?
- onetimemanytime 8y agoNo, you said that "courts," as if the Supreme Court had ruled. We have federal laws, state laws and federal judges making decisions based on state laws. Also even if a Federal Appeals court in a circuit rules one way is not binding on all.
- oh_sigh 8y agoI think OP was saying that you were taking a ruling from the 4th and 9th circuits and expanding it's domain as if it were nationally the case in the US.
- gaius 8y agoMy memory is hazy now but I recall in the mid-90s Gap (the clothing company) suing Genesis Access Point (an ISP) over gap.com and winning. First come first served is the only fair way to run domain names.
- lkrubner 8y agoThat relied on USA trademark law. Applied to the case mentioned in the above article, the government of France can seize France.com. The principle behind trademark disputes is, would a similar name cause confusion in the market place? The French government can make the case that it would be confusing if a private citizen was allowed to possess France.com. As a principle, "First come first served" has never won a case against trademark law. Or rather, the "first come first served" applies to whoever filed for the trademark, not the domain name. Put another way, trademark beats domain name.
- mercurial 8y agoAlso known as "enabling domain name squatters".
- themaninthedark 8y agoPerhaps so. But how would you have the issue resolved? Should the domain go to the most well known party? The product a reasonable person expects to find when they type in the address? What happens if I register icar.com for product that syncs your car to the cloud. Then Apple decides they want to compete with Elon Musk, with their new Icar. Who will get the domain? What happens when a large company decides to rebrand it's self and wants the domain? What happens to Nissan? http://www.nissan.com http://www.nissan.com
- mixologic 8y agoWow. Nissan.com has a dropdown labled "people's opinions" with 505 pages. Thats.. one way to build a navigation.
- 8y ago
- justherefortart 8y agoI transferred my domains off web.com after continually being forced to call to get anything done. They started sending me spam trying to trick me to switching back. Terrible company. They are register.com FYI.
- Shinkei 8y agoI'm pretty disappointed by all the armchair lawyering in this thread that isn't defending the individual/citizen in this case. .gov, .fr, etc were created for a reason. Trademark law is intended to protect people from intentionally misleading branding. These two items taken together should make it obvious that France.gov is the only name the government of France 'should' be entitled to. If you are willing to say that France.com should be available to the French government... then it's a slippery slope. Are you going to give them to right to take down critical websites with titles like Francesucks.com or Francegenocide.com. These lawsuits have played out before between private individuals like Madonna et al. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybersquatting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybersquatting Why should a government be privileged to seize any .com that they deem to be in their interest? There is no evidence that France.com was not being used in a nefarious or misleading way.... in fact it sounds like the government had at least unofficially endorsed the site's usage and contributed. It was being used for a bonafide business. I really think anyone defending a government's 'right' to seize this domain name is forgetting the underlying liberal democratic principles of the internet. Rights are for people, not governments. I don't see how France acting in this way serves its people constructively. EDIT: It seems like all people care to comment on is the fact that they (and I) already know that .gov is for the US government, while other countries have their own TLDs. Let me play Devil's Advocate for a moment to hopefully make you think more critically about this decision. What if you owned a famous China (dishware, cups, etc) company and registered China.com back in 1994. Do you think China should be allowed to take that domain? Or another, what if a new country were formed that were suddenly the same name as a pre-existing multinational corporation.... Government wins? Always?
- phereford 8y agoI know we are talking about this in the digital realm, but this also exists in the property realm too. Imminent Domain is used be governments to acquire land, generally below its actual valution, for building of infrastructure. I wonder if this concept will ever make it to the digital world.
- rrdharan 8y agoMinor nit I believe you mean Eminent Domain. Imminent Domain somehow sounds even scarier (and would be a great band name).
- gattafrettolosa 8y agoI am against emi ent domain but at least it is justified by the fact that there are no alternatives. A road between two points must pass through some land, but if a domain name for your website isn't available don't be a bully and buy another one. Also you have to compensate with eminent domain, you can't just take. Not in decent societies anyway. What we have here is maximum statism. A bunch of french bureaucrats had some stupid idea on how to spend stolen taxpayers money to "improve" society, and they used their position to steal a domain name from a guy who was minding his own business. In this case bureaucrats should be condemned as if they were thief.
- mcny 8y ago> In this case bureaucrats should be condemned as if they were thief. I don't think the public gets to go scott free in this. France is a democracy. If the French government does something, all French people are responsible for it. That's what the world says about us, why not France?
- UncleEntity 8y agoPretty sure France can't "imminent domain" property located in foreign lands -- like, for instance, they wanted 1600 Pennsylvania Ave as their new US tourism office.
- shiado 8y agoHe should consult the guy that owns nissan.com.
- sloxy 8y agowhy? nissan.com is owned by Mr. Uzi Nissan so there is a reasonable defense that he has a justifiable claim to the domain. seems a lot more clear cut than this.
- Cyph0n 8y agoSo you're saying that if the owner of france.com was a Mr. James France, the French government wouldn't have done the same thing?
- sloxy 8y agoThey might have. No definitive answer to that alternate timeline. If his name was France, his use of the domain would have been more defensible(depending on what he was doing with the domain).
- mcny 8y agoThe website claims that Nissan (the guy)'s business existed before Datsun became Nissan. I think there ought to be some kind of prior art for trademarks as well. It is not fair that a business suddenly not be allowed to use their trademark (even if they fail to register it) just because someone else registers it.
- misev 8y agoGermany doesn't seem to care much about http://germany.com http://germany.com :)
- Brushfire 8y agoThey probably are now.
- ada1981 8y agoOr UnitedStates.com - a spam site Or America.com (a godaddy page). Could this guy sue Web.com? Maybe he can win the fight to Web.com on behalf of the WWW.
- libria 8y agoBack in the early 2000's whitehouse.com used to be a patriotic-themed adult site. So I'm told...
- ams6110 8y agoMaybe they would care if it were deutchland.de.
- RandomCSGeek 8y agoI guess most <country_name>.com domains are not owned by the governments, as .com is quite old, and geeks would have got them long before govts thought of having a website. To add to the list, brazil.com(website inaccessible), russia.com, india.com(news website), china.com, southafrica.com
- CivilEngineer 8y agoFrance is a terrible country. I was forced to leave France three years ago after my family has been living there for several hundred years. It was no longer safe for us to walk the streets. We now live in Tel Aviv.
- pg_bot 8y agoWhy would the Paris Court of Appeals have any jurisdiction in this case? I'm surprised web.com didn't have their lawyers review the request and then throw it in the trash.
- forapurpose 8y agoIf web.com wants to do any business in France, or possibly if its executives ever want to travel there, then the French government has leverage over them.
- makecheck 8y agoSomehow, despite domains having sufficient differentiation, it has evolved to the point where the first part seems to be all that matters. In this case, "something.fr" should be sufficient in France and yet the reality is that if you don’t also control "something.<foo>" for all possible values of "<foo>", you might encounter a problem later. Even worse, it has evolved that we now have to care about certain patterns on certain sites. What if you don’t control "something.facebook.com", or "reddit.com/r/something" for instance? It’s crazy. We need to be deploying security technologies further so that names alone can stop mattering so damned much. All we seem to have in wide use are certificates, which are still not required and essentially not understood by users (if they don’t get an entity name and padlock, they’d probably load the site anyway).
- salzig 8y agoor they could have used .info, as country names are reserved .info names. »ICANN and Afilias have also sealed an agreement for country names to be reserved by ICANN under resolution 01.92.« - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.info https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.info
- return1 8y ago.com is a good compromise. i believe the average user assumes the .com domain to be the most legitimate / canonical.
- TipVFL 8y agoI'm surprised the article didn't mention the value of the domain. I used to work for a domain name marketplace where we sold kittens.com for $6 million dollars. France.com has to be worth a few million. Painful.
- gtirloni 8y agoI can't detect if you're joking but that seems pretty messed up. I guess from the looks of it today, kittens.com didn't turn a profit?
- TipVFL 8y agoNot joking. Single word domains under the .com tld are worth a lot, especially very common words. I don't know that kittens.com was ever turned into anything, they may have just bought it betting on it being worth even more in the future.
- gtirloni 8y agoThat's impressive. I need to re-calibrate my assumptions about this. Thanks!
- RomanPushkin 8y agoAlso worth watching https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mevVt5sHDNA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mevVt5sHDNA
- llcoolv 8y agoThe first thought which came to my mind was "Thanks god I don't have anything registered with Web.com". In case anyone does, right now might be a great moment to consider migration.
- PunchTornado 8y agoHow can one sue the French government in a Virgina court. Should the French government waste tax money in hiring American attorneys and representing itself? I would say no.
- YawningAngel 8y agoSince the French government has assets in the United States, yes it very much should.
- gremlinsinc 8y agoThis sounds like a case maybe EFF would be interested in backing.
- esterly 8y agoA stroll through archive.org shows there was a small business sending people to and blogging about France: http://web.archive.org/web/20160805122924/http://www.france.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20160805122924/http://www.france.... as .com is short for commercial it appears the owner was using the domain correctly before transfer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.com
- lspears 8y agoDomains on the blockchain?
- kardos 8y agohttps://namecoin.org/ https://namecoin.org/
- znpy 8y agoI was about to get some namecoins and register my .bit domain name but I decided to dig a bit more before going all in. Correct me if I'm wrong (seriously, please do) but it seems to me that namecoin being (technically) a fork of bitcoin, shares most of bitcoin's problems, in particular regarding mining and exchange. Here was my doubt: suppose that I get namecoins and obtain .bit domain name, how do i keep it registered? Do i have to mine? Do i have to renew by "spending" namecoins? Can i get namecoins on exchanges? (spoiler to last question: yes). Here is how it might just fail: given that namecoins has mostly the same cryptographic properties of bitcoin, if namecoin was to become widely adopted then everybody would start mining and selling namecoins, making namecoin price skyrocket at the point where 1) mining namecoins to keep your domains would become super expensive 2) people would burn "real" money on gpu mining and asic miners, accumulating large amounts of coins and keeping them hostage (that is, hoping to sell them for a lot of "real" money).
- arnoooooo 8y agoYou'd still have to agree on what rules to base your blockchain on. This is a political issue, not a technological one.
- hazeii 8y agoSome of us remember the issues with mtv.com (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MTV#Internet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MTV#Internet).
- return1 8y agobetween this and the various DNS hacks, maybe we should consider a trustless solution.
- ill0gicity 8y agoThis seems somewhat familiar to me... https://domainnamewire.com/2009/11/30/paris-wins-parvi-org-in-disturbing-domain-name-arbitration-decision/ https://domainnamewire.com/2009/11/30/paris-wins-parvi-org-i... Hopefully it turns out well for Mr. Frydman as it did for me (even though Paris still hasn't paid up): https://domainnamewire.com/2012/09/17/city-of-paris-ordered-to-pay-100k-for-reverse-domain-name-hijacking/ https://domainnamewire.com/2012/09/17/city-of-paris-ordered-...
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- walrus01 8y agoDoes anyone remember http://www.nissan.com http://www.nissan.com and its long, drawn out legal battle?
- SeanLuke 8y agoWhy is web.com not party to the lawsuit?
- mortdeus 8y agowhats messed up is that they now have the website redirected towards france.fr
- petraeus 8y agocanada.com is not owned by the government, its owned by postmedia the parent of rogers
- jhallenworld 8y agoIs France a company? Wouldn't they want france.gov? As an owner of worcester.com, this is the argument we had with the city of Worcester, MA in the 90s. They did in fact want worcester.gov.
- detaro 8y agoNo, they would not want france.gov, since they are not a government entity of the United States.
- jhallenworld 8y agoAh, I did not realize how much of a mess this had become.