Verizon awarded 'largest-ever' cybersquatting judgment

A federal court in Northern California has awarded $33.15 million to Verizon Communications in what the company is calling the largest cybersquatting judgment ever.

Verizon, which announced the judgment Wednesday, had filed the case against OnlineNIC, a San Francisco-based Internet domain registration company. Verizon had claimed that OnlineNIC used Internet names--663 to be exact--that were chosen to be easily confused with legitimate Verizon names, according to Verizon.

It might be hard, however, for Verizon to actually collect on the judgment, which was a default ruling, or one entered against a defendant who fails to answer a summons. No one appeared in court on OnlineNIC's behalf or in its defense, Verizon said.

We weren't able to get through to OnlineNIC by phone (the line just rang and rang), and an e-mail request was not immediately answered. The company claims on its Web site that it's an ICANN-accredited registrar--but only through 2006. And the site offers a mailing address in Oakland, Calif., not San Francisco.

The award amount was calculated based on $50,000 per domain name, Verizon said.

"This case should send a clear message and serve to deter cybersquatters who continue to run businesses for the primary purpose of misleading consumers," Sarah Deutsch, Verizon vice president and associate general counsel said in a statement. "Verizon intends to continue to take all steps necessary to protect our brand and consumers from Internet frauds and abuses."

Verizon, which says it has won a string of similar cases, is part of a not-for-profit coalition founded last year that fights cybersquatting.

[brandverity]

Did OnlineNIC actually held these registrations under their own account, or if the registrations are held by third parties and OnlineNIC was simply the registrar?

[terminalblue]

i hope they made lots of money and flew safely to some foreign country.

[Darryl Snortberry]

same here

[dargon19888]

Interesting.

If you do something like Verizin.com (a misspelling of Verizon)
You can see it registered to a John Ver Izin and a P.O.Box.
And a contact email at registar.com also registered with enom.com's registrar.

My guess is that Verizon did their homework and was able to get this to point back to the company.

As to collecting the funds, good luck. At least now they can go to ICANN and get the domain names transferred to them.

The registered entries were done to host advertisement pages so that they can collect money everytime someone enters a typo when they wanted to go to the verizon web site.

[Lerianis]

So what? That is a legitimate way of doing business, considering that people should LOOK AT WHAT THEY ARE TYPING INTO THEIR INTERNET BROWSER! I've gotten on my mother's case for not doing that and then calling me to "Find out why this thing isn't going to the right website!"
Got plenty heated with her as well the last time.

[Imalittleteapot]

K, not that this would fix this problem, but we're running out of .coms anyway. I'd like to see browsers and DNS servers recognize a secondary form of URL where I don't have to compete as hard for a decent URL. Maybe instead of .com I would get something based on my name and location or something like state.city.imalittleteapot or country.state.name or something? I never understood why we limited URLS to .com, .org, .net or whatever. why couldn't it just be .whateveryoufreakingwant? Is it just to make URLS worth more money? If everything is going to be .com why do I have to keep typing that in? Why can't we just drop that part completely? The whole system is a little F'd if you ask me. I don't know if .com is really for commercial or not but maybe we should just leave that to real businesses and have a secondary form for personal domains. Then again maybe that idea is completely retarded.

Anyway, I don't like the idea of this. I believe in first come first serve. If you're not first then too bad so sad, but then people turn around and use deceptive practices and mislead people and then that doesn't work either. But I'm sure if some very smart people put their heads together we could find a better solution than lawsuits, but maybe I have too much faith in humans.

[lordmorgul]

See: http://www.icann.org/tr/english.html

The top level domains are used to subdivide the DNS, and the limited registration of top level domains is primarily to help ICANN 'ensure universal resolvability so that all users of the Internet can find all valid addresses'.

If you just got to make any domain you wanted it'd be an absurd mess. We're not anywhere near running out of room in the current top level domains (yes .com is somewhat crowded), but there are quite a few other top level domains, like .name for instance.

As for your 'first come first served' concept... that's a horrible idea in the case of DNS, because a small startup company could take a few million dollars in capital and register hundreds of thousands of valid, and probably high demand domains. When a company that has a legitimate business reason to use that domain, and has established trademark and market for their brand, comes along... that domain being held for ransom is a very bad thing.

[Imalittleteapot]

lordmorgul: As for your 'first come first served' concept... that's a horrible idea.... Yeah I know. I mean it's not a horrible idea except for the simple fact that it doesn't actually work for the reasons you stated. This whole cyber squatting thing is what's retarded.

[commander.cool]

The problem is you get these scrubs that buy these names and try to spoof websites to steal peoples money. So you guys are saying it was ok back when the internet started that people were buying up mcdonalds.com and walmart.com. So if you owned a company, you would have no problem someone using your copywrited name???? Stop hating and start thinking about what you would do if it was happening to you.

[Lerianis]

What would I do? Absolutely nothing, because it's a case of 'first come, first served' as they say! If I was REALLY having a problem with the person in question: i.e. they were trying to 'spoof my site'.... I would contact the feds if I had anything important like a payment system on my page, because that is illegal totally.

[JCPayne]

It is sort of pointless adding more TLDs anyway. Who really likes non .com .net TLDs etc. anyways???? Other than ccTLDs?

Who really would goto prefer going to something like www.cnet.info or www.timewarner.biz or www.delta.aero etc??? In addition to this, the most sought after domains get filled up during the sunrise period anyway. The sunrise period means trademark holders get first crack at names that are worth the most money and then everyone else gets to join later. Adding more TLDs IMHO is useless.

[MSSlayer]

Who cares if it is .com, .net. or .info? *** does it matter?

[sanenazok]

If you have to attract actual customers you care! I would rather have a slightly creative .com name than anything else.

[JCPayne]

P.S. the .us allows various toying with the state and city levels.... It used to be an really cool plan too you could get to any city website simply by going to http://www.ci.(the city name).(the 2-digit state code).us/
e.g.

http://www.ci.miami.fl.us/
http://www.ci.portland.or.us/
http://www.ci.oakland.ca.us/
http://www.ci.boston.ma.us/
http://www.ci.houston.tx.us/
http://www.ci.lasvega.nv.us/

All you had to know was the city name and it's matching state code and it would forward you to the proper site. Towns I believe were http://www.town.(the town name).(the 2-digit state code).us/ Now--- cities are breaking this with all sorts of vanity names that you have to know first and can't guess.

[mellomutt]

"It might hard, however."

[mellomutt]

Of course a company wants to protect its brand. They can't buy online if they don't hit your site. What would be more interesting is for a law to be enacted that forces someone to relinquish a domain if they haven't done anything with it. You know how it is: you think of a great domain name and find that it has been purchased, and has only the one page full of those search result affiliate network ads and maybe a "This Domain May Be For Sale...Click Here!". The thing is...this only matters if you're a company or have a brand name. Otherwise, fi you have the content, the people will come, regardless of domain name (e.g. maddox vs pepsi.com). But think of how much more interesting the net would be if we, I don't know, force everyone who is squatting on a domain to register the domain as a trademark, absorb the ensuing cost of doing so, if they have fail to provide anything but ad links. Give a grace period of 24 hours or so. If a rambling blog entry can't be posted in that time, then you have to relinquish the domain, and you are not able to purchase it again for a year, assuming it is available. Framers, eat your heart out.

[Renegade Knight]

Naaaa. I've got a few domains, some plans, and no time to do jack about it until sometime later. If soome doffus comes a long and thinks their plans is better than my plan, 250K would change my mind. Of course with that money I could pay someone to do my plan for me.

[jtaverner]

OnlineNIC appears to be a Chinese company. A simple whois search shows that their primary name server is ns1.china-channel.com. A whois search on china-channel.com shows that that domain is registered to OnlineNIC in China.

Registrant :
OnlineNIC,INC. [e-mail] +86.5925391886
OnlineNIC,INC.
8th,Guanri Rd,Xiamen City,Fujian Province,China
xiamen fujian CN 361008

It is extremely unlikely that Verizon will ever see a dime in this judgment.

[tacit]

Not surprising, all in all. OnlineNIC is well-known to spam fighters. They're a rogue registrar that's used by many pharmacy spammers, and OnlineNIC-registered domains often figure prominently in fake employment scams, porn spam, and the like.

OnlineNIC has stepped in to fill the gap left when corrupt registrar EST Donains was forced out of business. EST Domains was a rogue registrar used by Russian organized crime to register domains for virus distribution, botnet control, and similar criminal activity. When they were finally shut down by ICANN, OnlineNIC aggressively pursued their former customers.

This also isn't their first problem with cybersquatting. They've been sued by Microsoft as well. One of the many shady ways OnlineNIC makes money is to register common typos themselves for various popular Web sites, then put up pay-per-view ad pages on those misspelled domains.

The California address for OnlineNIC is fake. It's an empty lot in an industrial area near a cement factory.