Comments on: EURid Suspends 10,000 .eu Domain Names

By: .EU-fiaskot (som vÃ¤ldigt fÃ¥ kÃ¤nner till) | Internet Sweden om domÃ¤ner och annat

Sat, 06 Nov 2010 18:48:20 +0000

[...] http://domainnamewire.com/2007/09/11/eurid-suspends-10000-eu-domain-names/ [...]

By: Andrew

Andrew — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 13:48:21 +0000

Thanks for the clarification and good info, John. I think most people agree with your assessment of EURid.

By: John McCormac

John McCormac — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 02:20:40 +0000

Andrew, Herman Sobrie is not reliable as a source when it comes to what is cybersquatted. He is just trying to spin the situation to make EURid and its incompetent management look better than it really is. There are generics in the Zheng/Buycool/Blogdo list but there is also a very high level of pure cybersquatting of business names and trademarks. It is obvious that this is an organised cybersquatting/cyberwarehousing operation.

EURid has been utterly incompentent when it comes to enforcing regulations regarding cyberwarehousing by registrars and cybersquatting and general entitlement issues. EURid manage to screw up the legal action against the Ovidio syndicate last year by breaking its own rules. It is very difficult to have any confidence in the management of EURid when it comes to dealing with the problems of .eu and the sooner these bozos lose the contract to run .eu ccTLD, the better it will be for everyone.

I’ve been tracking the .eu zone here since 2006 and have approximately 2.25M .eu domains actively tracked. Genuine registrars with real clients tend to have completely different characteristics to cyberwarehousing /cybersquatting operations.

The reason that Sobrie concentrated on the generics angle is because the Zheng/Buycool/Blogdo operation has been targeting the intellectual property of European and non-European businesses. It has registered the business names and trademarks of many of these IP owners as .eu domains.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 01:35:56 +0000

John, I was basing my claims that a number of the domains were generic based on the following from EUobserver.com:

“He explained that the woman had registered mainly generic names and numbers. “nobody is registering thousands of names just to have them, of course, so something else is going on there,” Mr Sobrie told EUobserver.”

By: John McCormac

John McCormac — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 20:23:17 +0000

Looking at the domains that the Zheng operation has registered, a lot of them are far from generic. There is a clear pattern of abusive and bad faith registration of trademarks and business names. Zheng is the biggest single loser of ADRs (the .eu UDRP actions). But then unless you are tracking the .eu zone in detail, how would you know what domains Zheng has? The generic defence just does not stand up – this is a cybersquatting operation that has targeted businesses and trademarks. It is based around two Chinese .eu registrars using a somewhat tenuous link to the UK (apparently a mail drop address and a UK phone number as proof of domicile).