Man Sues Nation For Allegedly Seizing France.com, a Domain He Has Owned For Over 20 Years (arstechnica.com)

A French-born American has now sued his home country because, he claims, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has illegally seized a domain that he's owned since 1994: France.com. From a report: In the mid-1990s, Jean-Noel Frydman bought France.com from Web.com and set up a website to serve as a "digital kiosk" for Francophiles and Francophones in the United States. For over 20 years, Frydman built up a business (also known as France.com), often collaborating with numerous official French agencies, including the Consulate General in Los Angeles and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. However, sometime around 2015, that very same ministry initiated a lawsuit in France in an attempt to wrest control of the France.com domain away from Frydman.

Web.com locked the domain, and Frydman even roped in the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard Law School to intervene on his behalf. By September 2017, the Paris Court of Appeals ruled that France.com was violating French trademark law. Armed with this ruling, lawyers representing the French state wrote to Web.com demanding that the domain be handed over. Finally, on March 12, 2018, Web.com abruptly transferred ownership of the domain to the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The company did so without any formal notification to Frydman and no compensation. "I'm probably [one of Web.com's] oldest customers," Frydman told ArsTechnica. "I've been with them for 24 years... There's never been any cases against France.com, and they just did that without any notice. I've never been treated like that by any company anywhere in the world. If it happened to me, it can happen to anyone."

Comments

Wow

[war4peace]

The world was always about who got more muscle.
Between a private citizen and a government, the government usually wins.

.gov?

[cob666]

Isn't this why there are top level .gov sites? I hope this guy gets his domain back or at least is rewarded substantial compensation for his loss. Web.com should also be penalized for just handing over a domain without notice.

Re:.gov?

[Yaztromo]

Isn't this why there are top level .gov sites?

No. .gov is reserved for US Government agencies only. They are not available to other countries.

Most other countries use a second-level domain against their country level domain for Government specific sites, like Canada's .gc.ca domain.

Yaz

Re:.gov?

[Yaztromo]

List of international .gov two-level domain equivalents

That's more than a handful.

Yaz

Re:.gov?

[mysidia]

All other countries get a TLD (.fr for France) which they are (AFAIK) free to administer as they please.

There's something you've misunderstood....
  TLDs such as .fr don't "Belong" to the country --- Yes, the local government will be _consulted_ in the process of appointing a ccTLD manager (to allow the government to offer any objections it might have), but the ccTLDs are not owned by, run by, or controlled by any "government"; the ccTLDs get delegated to a corporation or other entity that applies to have the ccTLD delegated and thus become the ccTLD manager, and the requirements to have the ccTLD delegated include that the operation must be "In the public interest" for the benefit of the community represented by the ccTLD.

There's an application / delegation process, and ultimately there's a decision made by the internet community in regards to appointing ccTLD managers, and it's the ccTLD manager that decides the registration policies.

Re: business's do it all the time

[jonwil]

In what universe does French law apply to a domain hosted and managed in the US by a US company?

Re: business's do it all the time

[hey!]

Apparently this one.

.gov TLD

[www.goatse.ru]

You know, this is PRECISELY why government TLDs exist. The .com TLD stands for commercial.

Is France going after every TLD now?

How about france.bargains?
france.coupons, anyone?
Perhaps france.mom should be surrendered...
france.singles certainly serves some governmental function
Or france.tattoo, needed by the Ministry of Tattoos to license and sell tattoo services.

The French government knew that they would lose the case in any court other than their own, so they put pressure on someone with no rights to the TLD to seize the property of its rightful owner.

Re:.gov TLD

[Anonymous Coward]

The irony of Americans complaining about other countries laws trying to force extraterritorial jurisdiction, and on the Internet no less. You and all the parents just made my day.

Re:.gov TLD

[Spazmania]

web.com is a Florida company. It should not be surrendering domain names without a proper order from a U.S. court.

Just be glad...

[Type44Q]

Just be glad that you're not a Pacific island, a Greenpeace vessel or a goose.

Re: business's do it all the time

[nctritech]

The registrar handed the domain over. They could have said "no, we're not a French company and it's not a French TLD, kick rocks" but they didn't. The actual hand-over probably has nothing to do with French law.

Vive le Marché Libre

[fibonacci8]

On October 1, 2016 ICANN ended its contract with the United States Department of Commerce National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) and entered the private sector.
Citation: https://www.icann.org/news/ann...

Congress didn't renew the contract, the Republican majority congress... Thanks Obama!

There's a procedure for seizing domain names

[Solandri]

It was implemented after the "Wild West" style of domain name registration, ownership, and transfer in the 1990s. The dispute goes through ICANN and is resolved by ICANN, not some French court. There's a section of the domain name dispute resolution policy specifically earmarked for trademarks. The trademark holder files the claim with ICANN, who receives evidence from both sides and grinds the wheels for a while, before deciding who ultimately gets the domain name. At that point, the registrar transfers ownership. France using the French court decision to pressure web.com to turn over ownership to them is probably illegal, even if they are correct that they own the trademark on "France".

(Also, I seriously doubt the French government holds a legitimate claim to the International trademark on "France". If that were possible, then China could register "China" as a trademark, and force all websites to cease using the word "China" in ways the Chinese government didn't like.)

Re: business's do it all the time

[Anonymous Coward]

The registrar handed the domain over.

The registrar did not own the domain. The registrar did not "hand the domain over." The registrar stole a domain they were paid to maintain a registry of. They stole what they sold from their customer to give to a foreign government.

The actual hand-over probably has nothing to do with French law.

Right, it has to do with US law. Specifically property theft, conspiracy to commit a crime, and possession of stolen property. The people responsible at the registrar deserve to be prosecuted and jailed along with all the other criminals.

Re: business's do it all the time

[Dog-Cow]

It's not that the law applies, it's that web.com are wimpy piles of shit who rolled over for a tyrannical government.

Re:Two things...

[moronoxyd]

1) Since when did French trademark law have jurisdiction over American domain names?
2) Doesn't trademark law require you actively defend your own trademarks? 24 years of doing nothing about france.com is not very active.

It seems that France didn't have a trademark for "France", so they had no reason to defend anything.
But once France.com applied for this trademark, the country of France had to object to this trademark. The idea that some company controls the trademark "France" and can decide who can use "France" in a commercial setting is just ridiculous.