Judge orders cybersquatter to pay Verizon $33m A federal court in California has upheld a massive $33.15m penalty against a cybersquatting domain aggregator that registered hundreds of websites mimicking Verizon's name and trademarks. The Reg reported on the initial ruling back in December 2008, suspecting that the American telco had a slim chance of ever finding the …
was the biggest mistake the Internet community (as it was back then) ever made. Cybersquatting, link farms, much malware, and much of he rest of the net's more irritating problems all come back to that. The genie isout of the bottle now, but had it been necessary for organisations or uindividuals to demonstrate a real use for their domains then the net would be an easier place to live in.
Erm lets wait a minute, you can feel sorry for freeloaders stealing music (albeit with the caveat that the strong arm of the record company action may lack rigour in its evidence gathering) yet you find it hard to feel sorry for a $33m judgement against someone who's simply used the domain name system to register some domains and make a bit of pocket money?
Okay, I HATE cybersquatters too, but I put the blame fairly and squarely on the registration process where registrars have for years been happy to sell 'em cheap and let the battle commence.
If a .com domain cost something reasonable for a business, say $100 /yr , whilst .org and .net and others were available to hobbyists etc for current next-to-nothing fees, then legit businesses wouldn't have half the trouble they have today with squatters and web-counterfeiters.
But the system is as it is and then along comes another stupid multi million $ judgement where at the most a grand and a slapped wrist would have sufficed...
I'm wondering why the law suit would link onlinnic for its services provided knowing that the registrants are responsible for all the so-called, "squattering" while onlinenic is not in any way representing Verizon. To my understanding, fining onlinenic makes no sense at all as they're just doing their job to provide their clients accorded in the TOS they provide. If a domain registrant change nothing in his DNS manager after purchase the default would definitely be onlinenic which shows pop ups (may be) by default. Its true with all registrars whether godaddy or any other domain name providers. I believe that the sole judgment should be made only to the domain squatters and not onlinic.
Thanks for the report nyway.
Regards,
Taang Sianpu Zomi
Apparently most of the people on the net these days have been around very long. The cost and procedures for registering a domain that used to be around in the early days of the internet did exactly this. It just so happened that our gov't is controlled by lobbyists and a particular organization felt it wasn't making enough money with the old way of doing things.
I remember when you had to provide business registration documents along with your fairly large registration fee in order to attain a .com domain, .net domains were only allocated to network providers and .org was mostly assigned to non-profits.
...is that the entities who decry the 'cybersquatters' are *too cheap* to actually register the domain names themselves, and thus actually prevent the problem.
One can certainly come up with many 'reasons' that make business sense to have a domain name *similar* to someone else's; or, if not a business, at least easy to find in relation to someone else's.
What ICANN *should* do is come up with a rate structure to purchase a domain name *and any similar ones not already registered* as a "package deal" - costing more than a single domain name, but less than the aggregate cost of registering them all separately.
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