Man’s 17-year quest to obtain short .com domains continues.
A Chinese man doesn’t seem willing to give up his fight to secure reserved one- and two-letter .com domain names.
Minjie Zheng filed lawsuits in China in 2008, 2011, 2014, 2018, and 2020, arguing that he should be able to register 67 single-character .com and .net domains, as well as many reserved two-letter domains.
After failing in Chinese courts, he filed a lawsuit against ICANN and Verisign (NASDAQ: VRSN) in California in May 2025. He claimed antitrust violations, breach of contract, unfair business
practices, and other violations. Zheng asked the court to order Verisign to register the domains for him and to pay for expenses and mental damages.
In September, the court granted motions to dismiss (pdf) by ICANN and Verisign. The court also found Zheng acted in bad faith. The pro se plaintiff ran afoul of the court in many ways, including, apparently, using AI tools for his filings, which resulted in false case citations.
After Zheng “expressed some contrition for his use of unverified, AI generated citations,” he continued to file documents containing false citations.
Verisign asked the court to grant it attorneys’ fees, arguing that it had to respond to additional baseless filings by Zheng. Verisign’s defense counsel attested that Zheng stated that he recruited five other individuals and had “explained to them that a person can use AI to help create and format documents to file in U.S. lawsuits.”
The judge ordered (pdf) Zheng to pay $66,000 to Verisign.
But Zheng isn’t stopping. He appealed the case to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals this month.
How do you know he is Chinese and what does race got to do in the domain business??