Re: Internet domain name controversies

On 10/10/96, Mario Heilmann wrote:
>
> Does anyone know why internic does this strange domain name policy?
> Why do they insist on spending enormous amounts of money defending
> themselves in lawsuits, if they could easily avoid this? Is there
> anything Internic stands to gain from this policy?

NSI says that a large part of its revenue comes from network design services for private clients -- administering COM is only about half of their revenue, it seems. The extreme favoritism that NSI shows for large moneyed corporate trademark owners ... could have something to do with the overlap between those trademark owners and its network-consulting client base.

But NSI offers a different explanation. NSI claims that it is in mortal fear of having some court hold it responsible for large monetary damage awards if some trademark owner blames NSI for the trademark infringement of some domain name owner. This mortal fear, says NSI, is the reason that it will cut off any domain name on the merest whisper of a threat from a trademark owner. The near-instant cutoff is intended to make NSI a less attractive target when the trademark owner goes to court.

Of course, this means NSI is sacrificing the livelihood and money of domain name owners to protect itself from an imagined and exaggerated risk. Hundreds of domain names have been cut off under this policy, and hundreds more have been browbeaten away from domain name owners by trademark owners that threaten to have NSI cut off the domain names. In other words, the number of domain name owners harmed by this policy is far in excess of the number that NSI has cut off.

No domain name registration authority has ever had to pay money damages to a trademark owner. When two companies fight over a desirable toll-free telephone number (one that spells some easily remembered word, for example, or the name of a company) do you think the phone company later has to pay? Of course not.

I have written a paper that attempts to figure out why NSI does this terrible thing. See it at <http://www.patents.com/nsi/iip.sht>.

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Carl Oppedahl, Oppedahl & Larson, patent law firm
http://www.patents.com/ has hundreds of pages of answers to 
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