New TLD company claims some expert testimony should not be allowed.
.XYZ is asking the court to dismiss expert testimony from four expert witnesses in Verisign’s false advertising lawsuit against the new top level domain company.
Some of the court filings are heavily redacted, leaving out the juicy details many in the domain name want to know. All expert witness reports were filed under seal.
For example, just what kind of deal did .XYZ have with Network Solutions when the latter gave away hundreds of thousands of .xyz domain names?
Based on evidence filings, it appears .XYZ was paying Network Solutions millions of dollars for an advertising campaign at the same time.
.XYZ is asking the court to throw out (pdf) expert testimony from accountant Mark Berenblut about how the deal with Network Solutions was accounted for.
And how is Verisign claiming that .XYZ’s alleged false advertising has damaged it?
Verisign hired expert witness Lauren Kindler to evaluate the losses. .XYZ finds fault in the report (pdf), saying Kindler assumed that all XYZ’s sales were due to false advertising and leaped to the conclusion that those sales caused .net to decline.
I’m curious what .net has to do with this, since the allegations are about disparaging .com. And if Verisign says .xyz has hurt .com, how is it calculating that compared to new TLDs in general? During Verisign’s investor conference calls, it has attributed the fall in .net, in part, to new top level domains in general.
.XYZ also wants Verisign employee Andrew Simpson’s expert testimony (pdf) held back from the trial. Simpson explained the number of available .com domains, but there’s some disagreement over availability of names vs. good names.
Additionally, .XYZ claims a survey (pdf) by expert witness Michael Mazis about whether a .xyz blog post was misleading should not be allowed.
Brian says
As I mentioned a few years ago, the new TLDs would enrich mostly:
1) Attorneys
2) The GTLD registries
3) Domain marketers & domain bloggers (those who advertise or promote the GTLDs)
If Versign prevails in this suit, I assume buyers of .xyz domains also could file similar suits, if they feel they were misled and have a bit of “buyers’ remorse”
Let’s see if Hooli.xyz, the fictitious company in the show “Silicon Valley”, gets involved — HaHa
Howie. says
‘expert’ is very subjective.
really says
thanks for sharing; this can potentially end up very costly and e mbarassing to Verisign
Christopher Wilkinson says
This affair should never have reached the US courts in the first place. It is ICANN’s responsibility to ensure fair conditions of competition in the DNS markets. .XYZ’s alleged registration policy should have been prevented by ICANN ab initio. (It was already clear several months ago that there was a problem, irrespective of Verisign’s putative interests.) CW
Rubens Kuhl says
ICANN only has a saying in competition issues when a registry files for a new registry service; and even that saying is not an yes/no answer, but a referral to competition authorities.
The only angle ICANN could look at is whether the registry offered other registrars similar conditions to NetSol’s; considering that .xyz cheap registrations already surfaced from other registrars in the market, the answer to that is most likely a yes.
Brad Mugford says
ICANN’s own policies require an affirmative domain registration.
Is a registry/registrar conspiring to create a shady opt-out scheme where if you do not opt-out a domain is registered in your name then stuffed into your account in compliance with that policy?
ICANN should have looked into that. To me it seems clear that doing nothing does not qualify as an affirmative registration.
Brad
couponpages says
As I’ve said in other posts, it’s easy to prove that something XYZ said may be false, but it’s very difficult to prove damages.
Using false statements may be grounds for preventing them from using them again, but it’s extremely hard to put a dollar value on losses as a direct result of their advertising. Even showing that a direct correlation of losses from Verisign with gains from XYZ can’t prove individual buyer’s motivation.
The way I see it, domain buyers fall into two categories:
1. High volume domain buyers / investors.
2. Low volume end users. People buying domains to build their own site.
Chances are most low volume domain buyers go directly to a Registrar like GoDaddy, and have never seen any of XYZ’s advertising, or registration figures, so they were not influenced by the ads… false or otherwise.
High volume domain buyers are another animal.
Even if a large percentage of high volume buyers and investors saw misleading ads, or even visited the XYZ site and had a full pitcher of XYZ Kool Aid, chances are they were skeptical because many of these buyers visit domain industry blogs for more in depth information.
For this second group, my guess is many of them were like me. 99% of the information I read about XYZ was extremely negative, so I saw a ton of more negative info than positive.
In spite of that, I still decided to take a chance on a small number of them (about 55), because they were relatively cheap, and more generic.
For the handful of more descriptive nTLDs I’ve bought, the registration prices are up to 4 times more expensive, even for the non-premium names, so I didn’t buy many of them. As a coupon domain guy, .coupons is $49, and .deals, .bargains, .discount, and .cheap are all $40. Meanwhile most of the ones I wanted were held back as premiums.