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This is without merit. Facebook is free to register as many domains as may please it, paying the fee for each. Those registrations are for exact strings. The

This is without merit. Facebook is free to register as many domains as may please it, paying the fee for each. Those registrations are for exact strings. They do not include any strings visually or phonetically or typographically similar to the registered string. Registering facebook.com does not automatically confer the rights to facebook-cdn.com, or facebook-images.com, or any other nearby string. The remedy for potential phishing domain names is to either register all those text-adjacent names first (unlikely), or to install measures on the registered domains that make it harder for phishers to fool the users, and limit the possible damage when those ruses succeed. You can't break the whole DNS system to protect one company. Do your own danged phishing defense instead of trying to turf it off onto others as an externality.

gruez 7y ago
>Facebook is free to register as many domains as may please it, paying the fee for each. Those registrations are for exact strings. They do not include any strings visually or phonetically or typographically similar to the registered string. You seem to be conflating domain name registrations with trademarks. Having the "facebook" trademark does indeed give you rights over similar names (eg. facebook-ads.com), if they're determined by a judge to cause consumer confusion.
- logfromblammo 7y ago
  Trademarks are restricted to a specific type of business. Any of those sites could operate as anything other than software or computer services, which are the likely trademark classes for Facebook. (I didn't look up their mark.) If one of those similar names puts up a website mimicking Facebook's sites, Facebook can then sue the operators as an unnamed party, and ask the court to order the registrar to reveal the unnamed party's identity, by convincing the judge that it's the only way to reasonably serve the defendants with the complaint. They cannot preemptively unmask the domain owner with trademark--not until after the trademark infringement occurs. Facebook is skipping steps, and somehow requiring registrars to determine or presume the intent for the use of a domain while registering the name. That's not how DNS works. It associates names with numbers, so that the Internet can be made out of words. Making the registrar the defendant is abusing the system, and if the court allows it, we all might as well sue Facebook for anything and everything that any of its users do to us on its platform, arguing that they should have known what evils those people would do back when they created their accounts. Also, "conflating" is not the correct word for the intent I presumed for your sentence. I am dissociating DNS registration from trademarks. This is valid, as DNS is run by ICANN, not the USPTO, or by any other international trademark registration agency. If ICANN chose, it could create top-level domains that correspond to international trademark categories, and automatically tie registered trademarks to those TLDs. It has not. So for now, there is no implicit connection between DNS and trademark. If I register something like coke.etc, and then put up an informational website about carbon fuel, Coca-Cola can't do anything to that domain on the basis of trademark. I have to infringe first.

gruez 7y ago

>Facebook is free to register as many domains as may please it, paying the fee for each. Those registrations are for exact strings. They do not include any strings visually or phonetically or typographically similar to the registered string. You seem to be conflating domain name registrations with trademarks. Having the "facebook" trademark does indeed give you rights over similar names (eg. facebook-ads.com), if they're determined by a judge to cause consumer confusion.

logfromblammo 7y ago
Trademarks are restricted to a specific type of business. Any of those sites could operate as anything other than software or computer services, which are the likely trademark classes for Facebook. (I didn't look up their mark.) If one of those similar names puts up a website mimicking Facebook's sites, Facebook can then sue the operators as an unnamed party, and ask the court to order the registrar to reveal the unnamed party's identity, by convincing the judge that it's the only way to reasonably serve the defendants with the complaint. They cannot preemptively unmask the domain owner with trademark--not until after the trademark infringement occurs. Facebook is skipping steps, and somehow requiring registrars to determine or presume the intent for the use of a domain while registering the name. That's not how DNS works. It associates names with numbers, so that the Internet can be made out of words. Making the registrar the defendant is abusing the system, and if the court allows it, we all might as well sue Facebook for anything and everything that any of its users do to us on its platform, arguing that they should have known what evils those people would do back when they created their accounts. Also, "conflating" is not the correct word for the intent I presumed for your sentence. I am dissociating DNS registration from trademarks. This is valid, as DNS is run by ICANN, not the USPTO, or by any other international trademark registration agency. If ICANN chose, it could create top-level domains that correspond to international trademark categories, and automatically tie registered trademarks to those TLDs. It has not. So for now, there is no implicit connection between DNS and trademark. If I register something like coke.etc, and then put up an informational website about carbon fuel, Coca-Cola can't do anything to that domain on the basis of trademark. I have to infringe first.