Category: enforcement

Enforcement of domain name rules, including by registries and registrars.

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Compliance with UDRP Decisions: A Case Study of Joker.com

Compliance with UDRP Decisions: A Case Study of Joker.com. (June 2003)

After a URDP panel orders a domain name transferred from respondent to complainant, the respondent’s registrar is obliged to do so. However, practitioners report that this process sometimes proceeds unduly slowly, if at all. This research attempts to quantify the magnitude of the situation and to report specific domains not transferred to their UDRP complainants, UDRP decisions notwithstanding.

Research yields 23 domains registered by registrar Joker.com, successfully challenged in a UDRP proceeding (one as long as three years ago), yet at the time of publication still registered to their original registrants at Joker.com. At least some of these domains seem to have been renewed by their current registrants, subsequent to UDRP decisions ordering their transfer.

 

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.NAME Registrations Not Conforming to .NAME Registration Restrictions

.NAME Registrations Not Conforming to .NAME Registration Restrictions. (May 2002)

In 2000-2002, the ICANN New TLD Program coordinated the introduction of seven new top-level domains to the Internet’s Domain Name System. Among these new TLDs was .NAME, a namespace intended, according to an appendix to its agreements with ICANN, to be used for “personal name registrations” of the form JOHN.DOE.NAME. However, a large number of .NAME domains do not follow the format specified in ICANN’s agreement with the .NAME registry. Rather than matching the first and last names of their registrants, or matching their registrants’ commonly-used nicknames or pseudonyms, these many domains instead seem to have commercial, humorous, or other intentions inconsistent with the .NAME charter and the .NAME registration agreements that bind all .NAME registrants; to follow naming conventions other than those required by the .NAME registry; or to reflect defensive registrations performed outside .NAME’s official Defensive Registration system.

In this research, I document several thousand domains reregistered within .NAME that seem to be inconsistent with the .NAME registration restrictions as embodied in an appendix to .NAME’s agreement with ICANN, and as embodied in the eligibility requirements posted by the .NAME registry and accepted by all registrants. A review of these specific registrations as well as their general characteristics may be helpful in understanding the behavior at issue and in evaluating enforcement of registration restrictions in this and other TLDs.