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Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

>ICANN has an established process for handling these types of disputes, and Facebook should avail themsleves of that process. https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/help/dndr/udrp-en

Facebook wants information on the registrants. A quick skim of the link you provided suggests that the process only results in the domain being taken down, not information revealed.

>Under the policy, most types of trademark-based domain-name disputes must be resolved by agreement, court action, or arbitration before a registrar will cancel, suspend, or transfer a domain name.

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If that is all Facebook is seeking in their suit, then I am fine with their lawsuit- and I am glad that Namecheap is holding out for a final, legal court order in a court of competent jurisdiction. Facebooks PR piece trying to paint Namecheap in a bad light is something I am not okay with. Namecheap is right not to give up this information without legal due process.

Lawyers,

Would the registrar normally be sued here? I would have thought it'd be against a fictitious defendant, with a Doe subpoena used to find out their actual identity.

ICANN's process for taking down domains works, if sometimes slowly. It's not always great for preventing the next phishing domain from popping up three minutes later from the same attackers.

I can see both sides of this one. Namecheap is doing the right thing by protecting customer privacy, and Facebook reasonably wants to stop what is probably a well-organized and persistent phishing campaign aimed at their own customers.

Facebook could pay NameCheap a few bucks to attach an observer pattern to some registration watch filter and get real-time notification from some narrow scope of name patterns.

In the olden days one would make a 20 line Perl script w/a nasty regex that's forked off for every registration -- and bill on the value not time to code.

Is a more modern pattern to egregious? FB just send NC a filter table.

Other name sensitive watchers could be added too.

You can apply directly to the registry to get zone file access. There are also services which already do this and provide APIs, etc. No need to set up special relationships with registrars.

> must be resolved by agreement, court action, or arbitration

You can't bring someone to court over trademark infringement if you don't have their legal address.

Yes you can.

You file what's colloquially known as a "John Doe lawsuit", then serve a subpoena to a third party (such as Namecheap) to obtain that information. You then have the information to amend the pleading and proceed against that party.

"Agreement, court action and arbitration" - all three of those require knowing the identity or at least directly communicating with the other party to start the process.

Not necessarily- they explicitly mention filing an in-rem action- which does not require knowing the identity of the domain registrant.

Didn’t they file that against Namecheap, not the registrants?

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