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Facebook WILL sue more registrars for cybersquatting

Kevin Murphy, March 13, 2020, 15:45:43 (UTC), Domain Registrars

Facebook has already sued two domain name registrars for alleged cybersquatting and said yesterday that it will sue again.
Last week, Namecheap became the second registrar in Facebook’s legal crosshairs, sued in in its native Arizona after allegedly failing to take down or reveal contact info for 45 domains that very much seem to infringe on its Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp trademarks.
In the complaint (pdf), which also names Namecheap’s Panama-based proxy service Whoisguard as a defendant, the social media juggernaut claims that Whoisguard and therefore Namecheap is the legal registrant for dozens of clear-cut cases of cybersquatting including facebo0k-login.com, facebok-securty.com, facebokloginpage.site and facebooksupport.email.
In a brief statement, Facebook said these domains “aim to deceive people by pretending to be affiliated with Facebook apps” and “can trick people into believing they are legitimate and are often used for phishing, fraud and scams”.
Namecheap was asked to reveal the true registrants behind these Whoisguard domains between October 2018 and February 2020 but decline to do so, according to Facebook.
The complaint is very similar to one filed against OnlineNIC (pdf) in October.
And, according to Margie Milam, IP enforcement and DNS policy lead at Facebook, it won’t be the last such lawsuit.
Speaking at the second public forum at ICANN 67 yesterday, she said:

This is the second in a series of lawsuits Facebook will file to protect people from the harm caused by DNS abuse… While Facebook will continue to file lawsuits to protect people from harm, lawsuits are not the answer. Our preference is instead to have ICANN enforce and fully implement new policies, such as the proxy policy, and establish better rules for Whois.

Make no mistake, this is an open threat to fence-sitting registrars to either play ball with Facebook’s regular, often voluminous requests for private Whois data, or get taken to court. All the major registrars will have heard her comments.
Namecheap responded to its lawsuit by characterizing it as “just another attack on privacy and due process in order to strong-arm companies that have services like WhoisGuard”, according to a statement from CEO Richard Kirkendall.
The registrar has not yet had time to file its formal reply to the legal complaint, but its position appears to be that the domains in question were investigated, found to not be engaging in nefarious activity, and were therefore vanilla cases of trademark infringement best dealt with using the UDRP anti-cybersquatting process. Kirkendall said:

We actively remove any evidence-based abuse of our services on a daily basis. Where there is no clear evidence of abuse, or when it is purely a trademark claim, Namecheap will direct complainants, such as Facebook, to follow industry-standard protocol. Outside of said protocol, a legal court order is always required to provide private user information.

UDRP complaints usually take several weeks to process, which is not much of a tool to be used against phishing attacks, which emerge quickly and usually wind down in a matter of a few days.
Facebook’s legal campaign comes in the context of an ongoing fight about access to Whois data. The company has been complaining about registrars failing to hand over customer data ever since Europe’s GDPR privacy regulation came into effect, closely followed by a new, temporary ICANN Whois policy, in May 2018.
Back then, its requests showed clear signs of over-reach, though the company claims to have scaled-back its requests in the meantime.
The lawsuits also come in the context of renewed attacks at ICANN 67 on ICANN and the domain industry for failing to tackle so-called “DNS abuse”, which I will get to in a follow-up article.

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Comments (2)

  1. Chris says:
    March 13, 2020 at 5:12 pm

    The GDPR truly shows the cultural differences between American and European lawyers. American laws are more absolute, while in Europe everything has to be measured. European laws usually demand that private parties weigh interests, while Americans tend to perceive weighing interests as a lawsuit waiting to happen.
    But I do find it quite interesting that many American media and tech companies seem to think they are the authorities on the internet. Which is both scary and understandable, as the actual authorities often seem to be absent on the internet. Which oddly enough also seems to be one of the strengths of the internet.

    Reply
  2. Graham Schreiber says:
    September 13, 2020 at 4:27 pm

    Kevin,
    You should observe, that the ICANN, IPC lawyer David Taylor [ IS NOT ] hired; and neither is his firm, Hogan Lovells, who have a representation in Arizona.
    Could it be, that Hogan Lovells was dumped, because Garrick Tiplady, who heads-up Facebook & Instagram Canada, was some considerable time ago, notified and well informed, that David Taylor profited from the Extortion / Racketeering campaign that the Kingpins behind ICANN Conspire to, Aid, Abet, Harbour and Flank?
    Now Kevin, go be a real journalist; and interview Garrick at Facebook in Toronto, to get his .FEEDBACK

    Reply

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