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

arstechnica.com

231–232 of 232 posts

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

#231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the domain owner should have registered a business called "France.com"

He did, but more importantly, the French government isn't a business either.

As far as I understand, this is a US citizen, having registered their domain with a US business (web.com), and the government of France filed a lawsuit in a US court, and the decision was made based on US law. And apparently US law allows this for the French government, even if they're not a US citizen or corporation (I'm not sure how that works but if it wasn't specifically allowed by US law, it wouldn't have happened).

So France didn't "seize" anything.

You can argue the govt of France shouldn't have filed this suit, but based on what reasoning? It's not really their job to protect the interests of US citizens. I mean, that's how it is. It's not very nice. In reverse, the US only seems to care about US citizens as well. I agree it would be nice if governments cared more about the rights of their allies' citizens as well, such as not violating their privacy on a global scale and not hacking into the private home computers of allies' citizens.

Also I kind of feel the article confuses the matter a little by referring to the guy as a "French-born American" (which isn't at all relevant enough to the case to lead with in the first paragraph), and incorrectly stating he "has now sued his home country" when he has in fact sued his country of birth. His home country is the USA if he's an American. (unless I got the meaning of those terms wrong, in which case I stand by the fact that it's confusing to lead with :) )

edit I think I wanted to reply to the sibling post, sorry for even more confusion :)

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

#232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I think as soon as he heard any sort of rumblings from those French entities, he would have been smart to transfer away from web.com to a real/first-party registrar. Potentially they would have been less likely to just hand over the domain.

I'm wondering if anything legally prevents Verisign or a registrar from saying "screw it, we're selling every domain name under our control and then shutting down our business." The total assets of Verisign and all of the .com registrars are surely far less than the value of all of the .com domains. Heck, the value of the FANG domains alone is probably worth more than all registrars combined. If Verisign transferred…

Can you please clarify what FANG domain means? A quick google search does not give much help (and actually leads back to this comment).
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