The domain monetization discussion at the Marrakech, Morocco ICANN meeting on June 27 included lots of fireworks.
First, a disclaimer. I wasn’t at the meeting. I just finished reading the transcript of the meeting. Much like reading an e-mail, sometimes it’s hard to understand the tone and meaning of things in writing.
Now that the disclaimer is out the way, here’s my take on “Domain Name Marketplace Workshop” at the meetings.
A killer workshop. Seriously. Jothan Frakes should be commended of pulling together so many personalities and experts. Also, props to ICANN for having both Vint Cerf and Paul Twomey on hand. I’m not sure if they were there the entire meeting, but they chimed in at the end. When I lucked into having breakfast with Vint Cerf at Domain Roundtable in April, it was clear that Cerf had not heard about many of the shady practices going on with registrars. Since Cerf is employed by Google, he had some questions about how marketplace activities are affecting his company. I’ll blog about that later.
As far as content goes, I wish I was there for the exchange between Sarah Deutsch of Verizon and Paul Stahura of eNOM. Deutsch nailed eNOM for holding onto a number of Verizon trademarks after they expired. Stahura had a good defense for much of it, but the fact remains that registrars are holding onto a number of trademarked domains well after they expire and often times auction these off the highest bidder. eNOM does it. GoDaddy does it. When some of these domains don’t sell at auction, GoDaddy even holds onto these domains.
I’d like to give a pat on the back to lawyer John Berryhill. It seems as though all of his comments are well thought. Here’s a sample…
On companies taking legal action even if it’s not as efficient as non-legal action:
you also have to understand that the prime users of advertising systems are trademark owners. And there are trademark owners who have taken the proposition that talking about domain risk, ICANN monitor — ICANN register 50,000 domain names, and I don’t know what they are doing for me. Or I can take the same amount of money and put it into PPC advertising with my trademark and that will automatically guarantee that those sites that are variations of my trademark will link to me, because the ultimate result is getting my customers to come to me. And one can use the typo-squatters as a method of outsourcing domain registration cost and legal cost if what you are interested in is having your customers associate your product with their Web site. And there are trademark owners who have made that decision…”
On Add/Drop (5 day grace period):
I’d say the elephant in the room is that, you know, VeriSign is not going to say one way or the other.
Apparently, VeriSign is unable to determine whether or not it’s making money.
And probably it will become defined abusive by them when they cease to.The problem is that it is a contractual provision, and, you know, when you have technical policy dictated by people like me, by lawyers, you end up with legal doctrines such as the interpretation of a contractual provision that allows you to do an activity which is in the middle of a contract that then says, “These are all the terms of this contract,” is that the purpose, if any, of the add-grace period is lost, and it becomes an irrelevant question as to whether or not someone is using the add-grace period in accordance with its intended purpose, because when one signs a contract, all one is left with is the words on the page.
And, you know, hopefully, the — this is the beginning of the discussion, at least on this particular provision of whether there are impacts that would require a revision to the contract.
On domain monetization and how someone makes money on everything, regardless of whether its a domainer or trademark holder:
Just a very tiny comment. I mean, the beauty of Internet ingenuity is that money changes hands even if nothing happens. For example, if you type an unregistered domain name into a browser bar, something will happen. What happens is going to be determined by your browser software publisher, or whatever plug-ins or toolbars you have installed on that browser. For example, if you install Microsoft Internet explorer and you type in an unregistered domain name, you will go to MSN search which is a monetized search system.
So part of — the arm wrestling match going on here is saying okay, we are going to stop add grace testing and monetization of vast numbers of unregistered domain names is putting a dollar into the pocket of Microsoft. So someone is going to get that dollar for traffic that is seeking a destination, whether the domain name is registered or not.
On trademark lawsuits such as the Dotster lawsuit, responding to Sarah Deutsche of Verizon:
Was that the response of the trademark community when Site Finder was running? Because every domain name in the Dotster suit, every unregistered possible string containing Verizon was being monetized by VeriSign when Site Finder was running and there was not a single trademark action that resulted from the monetization of the total unregistered name space.
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