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France seizes france.com from man who's had it since 1994

arstechnica.com

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Re: France seizes france.com from man who's had it since 1994

#191

Post by jsjohnst »

nodesocket wrote: post #10
jsjohnst wrote: post #5

Tangential to the core issue, but seems kinda weird to me that he claims he bought it from web.com in 1994 and he’s had the domain for 24 years when web.com has only existed for 19. A quick Wikipedia search would’ve clearly shown this. Further, in 1994, there’s only one place he could’ve registered this domain as it wasn’t decentralized until the late 90s. I guess Ars was sleeping at the wheel when posting this.

You can see some historical domain data using SecurityTrails: https://securitytrails.com/domain/France.com/whois Showing Network Solutions for a long time then switched to OVH in March.

Correct, I saw that. Network Solutions wasn’t bought by Web.com until 2011, and had Ars fact checked via a quick Wikipedia search they’d know this too. I don’t fault the owner (former I guess) of France.com, I fault Ars for not doing basic fact checking.

Re: France seizes france.com from man who's had it since 1994

#192

Post by jsjohnst »

phyzome wrote: post #169
brownbat wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The weird thing about this to me is that phone numbers always take you to the same phone, but domain names just involve me trusting some table I use to look things up. The internet is deeply democratic, maybe anarchic -- whatever rules I want my machine to follow it follows. If people generally disagreed with this decision, a viral hosts file would roll it back. (I don't think this so alarming a case that it will spa…

Phone numbers take you to the same phone until... - that person gets a new phone - a hacker politely calls customer support and asks to have a new phone activated on that number - the area code is split and someone else ends up getting the number The phone system has a lookup table too.

You forgot a few..

One important one is “customer ports the number to a different carrier”.

Re: France seizes france.com from man who's had it since 1994

#193

Post by nightcracker »

gnulinux wrote: post #189
jpambrun wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of those are US only, making .com the next best thing in this case I guess?

All countries have their respective .edu, .gov, .org etc and if you consider them I think my point still stands.

What do you mean? .edu and .gov are US-only.

Re: France seizes france.com from man who's had it since 1994

#194

Post by jsjohnst »

walrus01 wrote: post #179
mc32 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about the case where companies pay for vanity phone numbers that either match their business name, or approximate the business name: ex, 800 mattress or 800 eyeglasses?

since the 800 prefix has been exhausted, there is a pretty healthy secondary resale market in selling 800 numbers that have some recognizable combination of alphnumeric digits. "as seen on TV" type ads selling kitchen gadgets and such will pay a fairly large amount of money for a "good" 800 DID.

Based on your other replies in this thread, you obviously know that there are more toll free NPAs than just “800”. As many of them have been around a long time, I would argue they are just as recognizable.

Re: France seizes france.com from man who's had it since 1994

#195

Post by realusername »

djrogers wrote: post #19
scriptproof wrote: post #4

https://www.icann.org/resources/country-territory-names I have read the entire judgement and beside the fact you can not register the name of a country, he had not also the right to register a trademark from the beginning.

Wait a sec, “France” is a trademark?

It's obviously not a trademark since the name is older than trademarks themselves.

Re: France seizes france.com from man who's had it since 1994

#196

Post by TangoTrotFox »

lkrubner wrote: post #7

The courts, in the USA, have found that domain names are not property, instead they are like telephone numbers: ---------------- The court found that under the California tariffs, rules, and regulations applicable to public utilities, and under the terms of the contracts, the debtors had no “proprietary right in the number.” https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=0a84b472-c89f... Also: ...under Virginia law,…

Using the law to define theft is not a great idea.

Governments can and do steal. For instance multiple nations have now passed laws forcibly seizing land from individuals, without compensation, exclusively because of their race. That's still theft. More accurate would be to state that "this does not appear to be unlawful."

Re: France seizes france.com from man who's had it since 1994

#197

Post by TangoTrotFox »

lkrubner wrote: post #7

The courts, in the USA, have found that domain names are not property, instead they are like telephone numbers: ---------------- The court found that under the California tariffs, rules, and regulations applicable to public utilities, and under the terms of the contracts, the debtors had no “proprietary right in the number.” https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=0a84b472-c89f... Also: ...under Virginia law,…

Using the law to define theft is not a great idea.

Governments can and do steal. For instance multiple nations have now passed laws forcibly seizing land from individuals, without compensation, exclusively because of their race. That's still theft. More accurate would be to state that "this does not appear to be unlawful."

And domains are not like phone numbers, they're like entries in a phone book. This would be more analogous to a famous "Joe Blow" getting the phone book to remove every other "Joe Blow" from the phone book since he feels (and is probably correct) that if somebody's looking up "Joe Blow", they're probably looking for him. And that is not an action I think is reasonable.

Re: France seizes france.com from man who's had it since 1994

#198

Post by walrus01 »

jsjohnst wrote: post #194
walrus01 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

since the 800 prefix has been exhausted, there is a pretty healthy secondary resale market in selling 800 numbers that have some recognizable combination of alphnumeric digits. "as seen on TV" type ads selling kitchen gadgets and such will pay a fairly large amount of money for a "good" 800 DID.

Based on your other replies in this thread, you obviously know that there are more toll free NPAs than just “800”. As many of them have been around a long time, I would argue they are just as recognizable.

Yes, i'm well aware of that... I actually control the DIDs for some 800 numbers that are very valuable, we've been offered a great deal of money to transfer them. 800 remains the most valuable by far, particularly for direct sales to consumers in the US market, because it's existed for the longest amount of time. NPAs 888 and 877 are not nearly as valuable.

If you're setting up the inbound call center call routing for something like selling slapchops or asbestos-related personal injury lawyers (just as an example of television direct marketing), a vastly higher percentage of the age 55+ target market recognizes 800 immediately but is less certain about 888, 877 and others.

Re: France seizes france.com from man who's had it since 1994

#199

Post by invaliduser »

trumped wrote: post #82
lkrubner wrote: post #7

The courts, in the USA, have found that domain names are not property, instead they are like telephone numbers: ---------------- The court found that under the California tariffs, rules, and regulations applicable to public utilities, and under the terms of the contracts, the debtors had no “proprietary right in the number.” https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=0a84b472-c89f... Also: ...under Virginia law,…

Wow that's crazy... you buy something yet but you don't own it. It's a bit like cellphones, I guess.

What you buy is a temporary licence to use a domain, the fact that you need to renew it every year or so is a good sign that nobody "owns" a domain name (and that it was designed this way, with a limit on the number of years you can buy)

Re: France seizes france.com from man who's had it since 1994

#200

Post by walrus01 »

brownbat wrote: post #163
lkrubner wrote: post #7

The courts, in the USA, have found that domain names are not property, instead they are like telephone numbers: ---------------- The court found that under the California tariffs, rules, and regulations applicable to public utilities, and under the terms of the contracts, the debtors had no “proprietary right in the number.” https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=0a84b472-c89f... Also: ...under Virginia law,…

The weird thing about this to me is that phone numbers always take you to the same phone, but domain names just involve me trusting some table I use to look things up. The internet is deeply democratic, maybe anarchic -- whatever rules I want my machine to follow it follows. If people generally disagreed with this decision, a viral hosts file would roll it back. (I don't think this so alarming a case that it will spa…

> The weird thing about this to me is that phone numbers always take you to the same phone

Actually no, the whole point of number portability in the north american numbering plan is that they don't, allowing the end-user of a phone number to move it from one service provider to another as they please.

For example from an MVNO riding on AT&T to T-Mobile, or from a Telus landline POTS number to a pure-voip SIP trunking/DID-termination provider.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_number_portability

this would be logically similar to transferring a domain from one registrar to another, while the ownership info remains the same. It's hard to make an exact analogy, but what carrier a number goes to in the number portability system is not extremely dissimilar from what authoritative nameservers are entered for the ns1/ns2/ns3 for a typical .com domain.

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