December 29, 2008 - 3:34am
Cybercrime never stops capitalizing on others' names and customers' credulity. A sad truth with that is ICANN's eternal incompetence of what is going on within the borders of the virtual space where it is expected to be at least an agency surrounded with the decent partners and clients if it cannot act as an arbitrator or regulator. This year Verizon filed a cybersquatting lawsuit against a shady domain aggregator OnlineNIC that registered hundreds of websites using the company's name and trademarks.
The judgment was exercised last week by a federal court in Northern California and what is noticeable with the case the defendants were not there and the procedure turned to go by default. Well, it was to be expected and in fact it wasn't a great surprise taking into consideration that the defendants are not known at all and there is no correct mailing address of any responsible person to serve the court summons. The court ruled that OnlineNIC should pay $50,000 for each of the 633 domains Verizon claims were created specifically to be confused with legitimate Verizon brands. Thus the total fine amount accounts for $33.15 million. The fake Verizon sites hosted ad links and pop-under advertisements that resulted in revenue for OnlineNIC.
According to Verizon OnlineNIC conceals its owners' true identities and involvement through providing false entity and names information for ICANN registration. Praised be ICANN that in a quite long period of its existence didn't yet get around starting to thoroughly check the identities of those whom it is accrediting. Surely, money paid for accreditation are much more precious than their reputation and huge losses the whole Internet community has been suffering so far.
The judgment was exercised last week by a federal court in Northern California and what is noticeable with the case the defendants were not there and the procedure turned to go by default. Well, it was to be expected and in fact it wasn't a great surprise taking into consideration that the defendants are not known at all and there is no correct mailing address of any responsible person to serve the court summons. The court ruled that OnlineNIC should pay $50,000 for each of the 633 domains Verizon claims were created specifically to be confused with legitimate Verizon brands. Thus the total fine amount accounts for $33.15 million. The fake Verizon sites hosted ad links and pop-under advertisements that resulted in revenue for OnlineNIC.
According to Verizon OnlineNIC conceals its owners' true identities and involvement through providing false entity and names information for ICANN registration. Praised be ICANN that in a quite long period of its existence didn't yet get around starting to thoroughly check the identities of those whom it is accrediting. Surely, money paid for accreditation are much more precious than their reputation and huge losses the whole Internet community has been suffering so far.