FTC Warns That Rapid Expansion of Internet Domain Name System Could Leave Consumers More Vulnerable to Online Fraud
Letter Urges ICANN to Implement Pilot Program, Take New Steps to Protect Consumers
The Federal Trade Commission today sent a letter to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the organization that oversees Internet domain names, expressing concern that the organization's plan to dramatically expand the domain name system could leave consumers more vulnerable to online fraud and undermine law enforcers' ability to track down online scammers.
I have a client whose domain name is two letters followed by ".com". Recently the contact addresses for the domain received an email claiming to be a DMCA takedown notice related to a site whose domain name ENDED in those two letters (i.e, those two letters are a valid country code.) There was no further correspondence after I replied pointing out that my client was not affiliated with the domain and in no way responsible for domains handed out by a registrar in a country half way around the world but it bothers me that someone, whether law clerk or scammer, who could be bothered to look up the domain contacts and yet make the cybernetic equivalent of assuming that John Goodman is the same person as Elton John.
(If anything, people should be aware that 'similarity' is an unnatural concept to a computer, and that even the subtlest difference between two input values is likely to cause a computer to treat them as unrelated.)
Anyway, I'm not sure if I'm agreeing that introducing new domains poses significantly increased risk or whether I'm writing off some people as so inattentive to detail that trying to limit the risk is pointless.
You sure that the takedown notice was prepared by a person?
***** Moderator's Note *****
If the "DMCA" notice was machine-generated, then that's a lot worse: if we assume, for the sake of argument, that the SOPA bill becomes law, then the entertainment industry will obviously be motivated to automate the DMCA notice and domain-removal processes. After all, they'll figure that false-positives waste the time of "those nerds", and assume that anything they do will have a chilling effect on every website owner, ISP, and (most importantly) on the whole apparatus of electronic entertainment distribution and sales, all to the betterment of their stranglehold on the production of plastic media.
I have said before, and now repeat, my belief that "copyright protection" is a red herring: copying has always been, and always will be, a marginal cost to the entertainment industry. What the industry's executives are /really/ afraid of is that performers will realize that they can get more money from "shareware" entertainment than they'll be paid by the cokebrained thugs at the record labels: once a single major artist demonstrates this for all to see, Hollywood's Golden Goose will be applying for work in the insurance industry, and a lot of coke dealers will be out of their very easy jobs.
Bill Horne Moderator
Moderator's Note Copyright (C) 2011 E. William Horne. All Rights Reserved.
Let me try to understand. Your client's domain name might have been, say, ru.net or tv.com, and the takedown notice emanated from, say, net.ru or com.tv? That'd be amusing :-) .
As a service provider with several IP blocks, we tend to get a few DMCA notices. I'd estimate at any given time, at least 10~20% of them are bogus.
Yes, I get mixups in domain names all the time, somebody looked up the .com version when whatever was wrong was in somebody else's .net or whatever IP space. My customer has the .com, somebody else has the .net. People just assume the .com.
OP stated his client had the domain "XX.com", where "XX" was a valid ccTLD. got a DMCA complaint about '{mumble}.XX', where 'XX' matched his client's domain.
In "days of old" there was an 'interesting' conflict between the U.S.-centric 'Internet', and the backbone ("JANET") in Great Britain. JANET used names with the 'most significant part' first. as opposed to the "Internet"s 'least significant part first. Made life "interesting", trying to figure out where to send something addressed to, say, 'uk.com' -- was it a JANET address or an Internet one? There were a number of well-known conflicts. And there was at least one multi-national company (a now-defunct 'big 8' accounting firm, with a substantial U.K. client base) that deliberately set up FQDNs which worked in either ordering.
Imperial College had even made up a little song to help remember on which side of the Atlantic they were known as ic.ac.uk and on which as uk.ac.ic. Sump'n along the lines of "Istanbul not Constantinople."
Merry Christmas, Happy New (Leap) Year, and Cheers, -- tlvp
Not emanating from but concerning an image posted to a site whose URL used a domain ending in the two letters. For example, I will choose two letters that are not a valid country code and a domain that is registered but doesn't seem to have a web page: xy; I hope that posting the following causes them (and me!) no grief: the email was from an unrelated domain, claiming to represent the copyright holders of a certain image that had been posted to site example.xy, but the notice was sent to the contacts for xy.com.
It reminds me of a advertisement I saw several years ago for something like (I forget the exact details) a mobile device that could access email and the ad used a phrase like
formatting link
obviously the creators (and approvers) of the ad assumed that everything on the internet started with "www", even email.
Nah ... they assumed the viewing public would be thinking that. But why they assumed noone would fault their spelling in the run-together part of the URL is beyond me -- imagine: Can You Believe I Am Read Nigth Is _dot_ com -- should be Night, no? (or is it Nigh 'Tis? -- naah, that makes no sense :-) ).
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