Company cancels affiliate accounts due to sales tax law.

Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN) has officially dumped its North Caroline affiliates (aka “Associates”), as it threatened to do a couple weeks ago.

North Carolina’s legislature has created a lose-lose-lose situation by preparing to pass a law requiring online companies to collect sales tax if they have affiliate marketers in the state. Since major ecommerce companies such as Amazon will drop affiliates in the state, the law won’t have the desire effect. Instead, North Carolina’s income tax will go down as it puts its constituents out of business. Amazon gets less sales, affiliates lose income, and North Carolina doesn’t get the tax revenue it hoped for.

A Domain Name Wire reader sent this e-mail from Amazon:

We are writing from the Amazon Associates Program to notify you that your Associates account has been closed as of June 26, 2009. This is a direct result of the unconstitutional tax collection scheme expected to be passed any day now by the North Carolina state legislature (the General Assembly) and signed by the governor. As a result, we will no longer pay any referral fees for customers referred to Amazon.com or Endless.com after June 26. We were forced to take this unfortunate action in anticipation of actual enactment because of uncertainties surrounding the legislation’s effective date.

Please be assured that all qualifying referral fees earned prior to June 26, 2009 will be processed and paid in full in accordance with our regular referral fee schedule. Based on your account closure date of June 26, 2009, any final payments will be paid by September 1, 2009.

In the event that North Carolina repeals this tax collection scheme, we would certainly be happy to re-open our Associates program to North Carolina residents.

Man slated for CEO position at ICANN uses fake information for his web site’s whois record.

Rumor has it Rod Beckstrom, former cybersecurity director for the US Department of Homeland Security, will be the next ICANN CEO. Before he takes over the reigns, he really needs to clean up the whois information — especially since ICANN is working to clean up whois inaccuracies.

As pointed out by a commentor at TheDomains, Beckstrom’s personal web site, Beckstrom.com, has a questionable whois record:

Registrant:
Private
private
private, CA 11111
US

Domain Name: BECKSTROM.COM

Administrative Contact:
Private, Private private@private.com
Private
Private, CA 11111
US
111 111-1111 fax: (650) 618 0423

Something tells me that a call to that phone number will go unanswered. And unless he is behind the porn site at private.com, he likely won’t receive any emails at his address, either. Anyone know something about Private, California? Sounds like a great place.

Perhaps whois accuracy will take a back seat under his watch.

Woods loses domain name arbitration case.

Golfer Tiger Woods has lost an arbitration case to get the domain name that matches one of his kids’ names.

The case involved Woods’ second son, Charlie Axel Woods, and the domain name CharlieAxelWoods.com. To make his case, Tiger Woods claimed the domain name was confusingly similar to his trademark for “Tiger Woods”. But the arbitrator declined to find similarity, and rightfully so. Although it’s clear that the domain’s registrant registered it with Woods’ kid in mind (he even listed it for sale on eBay), UDRP is not the proper mechanism to get a domain name like this. It would be inappropriate to find a child’s name confusingly similar to a parent’s name. That said, I’m sure it has happened in the past.

Last month Tiger Woods filed a similar case for the domain name SamAlexisWoods.com. The registrant of the domain name offered to transfer it once the case was filed.

Media company loses attempt to get domain names through arbitration.

Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia has lost a domain name dispute over the names EverydayFood.com and Everyday-Food.com. The company operates a magazine and TV show called “Everyday Food”.

Martha Stewart Living didn’t just lose, it choked. A three person arbitration panel found that the company didn’t prove any of the three elements required to win at arbitration.

The company claimed that it had rights to the domain names based in part on an “intent to use” trademark application filed with The United States Patent and Trademark Office. These filings were made prior to the respondent registering the domain names, but both applications were under refusal when the domains were registered, argued the respondent’s attorney John Berryhill. Berryhill claimed:

The Complaint is premised on the proposition that the mere filing of a registration application, which anyone may do at any time for any word or phrase regardless of use, registrability, or eventual disposition of the application, acts as a bar to registration of a domain name. There is no principle of law or doctrine under the Policy which supports such a premise, and quite a body of decisions which contradict this premise.

I guess foodies everywhere will have to continue typing three more letters to access the magazine’s web site: EverydayFoodMAG.com. Hopefully they’ll still have time to make American Flag Tarts for the upcoming holiday.

Two articles you should take the time to read.

Over the past 24 hours I’ve read two great domain name articles I want to pass along.

The first is an editorial by Jeremy Rabkin, Professor of Law at George Mason University. Rabkin discusses what ICANN independence from U.S. oversight would actually mean. He points out that independence may be a bad thing, even for countries that disdain U.S. control:

Down the road, one can imagine demands from Brussels that ICANN cooperate with EU efforts to tax commercial sales negotiated over the Internet. Or perhaps it will demand a new understanding aimed at forcing top level domain managers to uphold EU privacy standards against U.S. government security measures. Or perhaps the EU will demand that a certain number of ICANN directors be appointed from a list of nominees provided by the EU, itself.

ICANN might try to defend itself by rallying political support in other quarters. It often talks about Internet “stakeholders.” The term is so amorphous it can encompass a variety of advocacy groups, concerned about Internet policy—or governments associated with national domain names (whether the association is notional, as in Mexico or Australia, or directly managerial as in China). A threatened ICANN is likely to be a more politicized ICANN.

I’ve long agreed with the views Rabkin so eloquently explains. This week at the ICANN meeting in Sydney, the Governmental Advisory Committee welcomed a Chinese delegation back to its club. That should send shivers down the spine of free speech advocates around the world.

The second article worth reading is a post by Rick Latona about new gTLDs. I don’t want to write much to give away the punch line, but you should take a few minutes to read it.