Recent Posts
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Single-letter .com case back in court
The domainer trying to get his hands on all the remaining single-character .com and .net domain names has re-filed his lawsuit against ICANN.
Bryan Tallman of VerandaGlobal.com (dba First Place Internet) has filed an amended complaint in a California court, after the judge threw out his initial complaint in March. He alleges deceptive trade practices and breach of contract, among other things.
His claim is that he has sole rights to all unregistered single-character .com and .net domains, such as 1.com and a.net, because he’s registered the matching domains in Verisign’s internationalized domain name transliterations, such as the Hebrew קום. or the Korean/Hangul .닷컴.
He paid Verisign, via registrar CSC Global, $25,285 for 1.닷넷 back in 2017 and reckons he was also buying the exclusive rights to 1.com and 1.net. The same arguments applies to the dozens of other ASCII.IDN domains he registered, according to the complaint.
The argument rests almost entirely on a letter (pdf) from Verisign to ICANN in 2013, in which the registry sets out some of its plans for its IDN gTLDs.
The letter is imprecisely worded, to the point where if you squint a bit, drop some acid, and hit your head against the wall a few times, you might be persuaded that Verisign is saying it would be willing to sell the rights to 1.com for 25 grand.
The complaint says this letter is “ICANN policy”, and the rest of its arguments are pretty much based on that incorrect premise.
ICANN has already filed a demurrer, asking the court to throw out the complaint again, largely on the grounds that the letter is not “policy” and ICANN doesn’t have a contract with any of the plaintiffs that it could be accused of breaching anyway.
The latest filings can be found here.
Interesting read. Thank you for sharing. H