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1999
CYBERSERK AWARD
A
Plethora of Candidates
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FOR
IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Tiburon, CA (January 6,
2000)
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The authors of The
Domain Name Handbook
are pleased to announce their selection for the 1999
Cyberserk Award. This award is bestowed annually upon a
company, organization, institution or individual deemed
unclear on the concept of the domain name system. The
winner is picked by a two-person jury--siblings
Ellen
Rony
of Tiburon, California and Peter
Rony
of Blacksburg, Virginia--who approach the task with
special seriousness. It is their belief that highlighting
the activities of cyberserkers will provide an
educational reality check. The prior
award winners
were the Prema Toy Company (1998) and Procter and Gamble
(1997).
In
1999, the jurors found no dearth of candidates qualifying
for the dubious distinction. With Internet traffic
doubling every 100 days, domain names took on greater
ubiquity in 1999. Dot COM addresses were plastered
brazenly across billboards, store fronts, bus panels,
t-shirts and even individual fruit. They were featured in
television commercials, magazine ads, packaging labels
and an increasing number of syndicated
cartoons.
Domain
names became valuable corporate assets and the shorthand
to an unprecedented repository of information. The
surging demand for .COM names, coupled with the
uniqueness requirement, raised the price bar on stellar
dot COMs. A few near-million dollar milestones were
reported during the year: $1.035 million for
WALLSTREET.COM at auction in April, $0.5 million-plus for
COMPUTER.COM in May, and $0.823456 million for DRUGS.COM
auctioned in August. But these daunting sums paled next
to the new record price paid late in November for
BUSINESS.COM. eCompanies, a venture led by EarthLink
Network founder Sky Dayton and former Disney Internet
executive Jake Winebaum, bought the domain name for a
staggering $7.5 million, up from $150,000 in June of
1997, when the BUSINESS.COM domain last changed hands.
The high-priced resales did not go unnoticed by
cyberspeculators and fed a domain name profiteering
frenzy. Registrations were running about 10,000 per day
by year's end. A bowl of sour cherries to all those who
warehouse an inventory of domain names solely for the
stunning return on investment.
Concern
that domain names would become a battle cry for customer
and employee complaints, corporations preemptively added
ridiculing registrations to their own holdings. Procter
& Gamble, our original Cyberserk Award winner, began
marketing a new product, Febreze, that neutralizes pet
odor. The corporation was so worried that it would become
the target of animal rights activists who believe the
product is dangerous to pets, that it registered:
FEBREZEKILLSPETS.COM, FEBREZEKILLSDOGS.COM,
FEBREZEKILLSBIRDS.COM, FEBREZESUCKS.COM, and
IHATEPROCTERANDGAMBLE.COM. While we weren't ready to
declare P&G a two-time winner, the corporation earned
a scent-free pewter pelt for sniffing out potential
criticism in this manner.
Registration
paranoia also struck the campaign of Republican
Presidential candidate George W. Bush. Unhappy with the
satirical and potentially damaging profile posted at
GWBUSH.COM, his campaign advisor registered 260
Bush-related domains, including some decidedly
denigrating ones--BUSHSUCKS.NET, BUSHSUX.ORG, and
BUSHBLOWS.COM--suggesting that he thought his job was to
silence both satire and criticism. A Texas-sized copy of
the U.S. Constitution goes to those on the Bush team who
rallied for "limits to freedom" because of the website
brouhaha.
"Domania"
grabbed headlines throughout the year. A market
enthralled by the Internet racked up huge gains for IPOs
with .COM appended to their business name.
MARKETWATCH.COM increased 509% in value from the issue
price and the first day's close while THESTREET.COM, a
financial news Internet site, soared from $19 to $60 on
its first day of trading. At least 100 Internet-related
companies announced name changes in 1999, and more than
half of these included the addition of .COM to the
corporate moniker. After the on-line technical book
retailer Computer Literacy switched to the off-beat name,
FATBRAIN.COM, its stock jumped 36 percent in one day,
adding more than $100 million to the company's market
cap. A set of rose colored glasses to all the optimistic
investors who redefined market fundamentals in
1999.
DUBIOUS
DISTINCTIONS
A
GPS chip goes to Network Solutions, Inc.
(NSI)
for acts which reveal more hubris than cyberserkery. On
the eve of the introduction of competition into the
domain name registrar business, NSI folded the InterNIC
website into its own "to help customers more easily find
the information, services and tools they need." In this
streamlining process, the world's largest registry
rendered thousands of links stranded in
cyberspace.
Both
DOT and COM were prominent imagemakers in 1999. NSI
branded itself as "the dot com people", and Sun Systems
advertised itself as "the dot in dot COM". An Oregon
hamlet whose economy needed a boost was the first to
append .COM to its name. Halfway, founded in the early
1880s near the Idaho border, adopted the name HALF.COM,
hoping the newfound attention would bring the town of 365
residents out of its slump. Equally waggish, Mitch
Maddox, 26, also traded in his name in an effort to prove
how wired the world has become, Now legally called
DotComGuy, he moved into an empty Dallas home at the end
of 1999, equipped only with a laptop computer. For the
next twelve months, he plans to rely solely on the
Internet for his survival, ordering food, furniture and
clothing online. The stunt seems strangely reminiscent of
the movie dud, Bio-dome, and rates high on our in-house
cyberserk meter. We believe the experience will be its
own reward.
Many
notable domain name disputes grabbed headlines and
navigated through the court system. An applicant for
SHITAKEMUSHROOMS.COM was denied the registration because
it contained four letters that NSI considered obscene.
Archie Comic Publications, with a cartoon character
called Veronica and a domain at VERONICA.COM, sent a
cease and desist letter to a man who established a
non-commercial site at VERONICA.ORG in honor of his
infant daughter. Did these attorneys learn nothing from
our 1998 Cyberserk winner, the Prema Toy Company, which
tried the same maneuver with POKEY.ORG?
In a lawsuit
over the addition of an "s" to a trademark owner's domain name, a U.S.
District Judge ordered
NSI to de-register WORLDSPORTS.COM and barred it from permitting the
registration of any similar word, name or term by any party other than
plaintiff. We award a gallon of glue to the magistrate to make the slope
of his opinion less slippery. At least his ruling was reversed on appeal.
Policy
wonks and lawmakers also hammered away at the ongoing
trademark/domain name battles.The Internet Corporation
for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN),
led by ten unelected and unaccountable individuals,
adopted a Uniform
Domain Name Dispute Resolution
Policy
for its new .COM, .NET and .ORG registrars. It would be
hard to overlook this document when considering
candidates for the 1999 Cyberserk Award. While the ICANN
Board resolved to define and minimize reverse domain name
hijacking, it sidestepped any meaningful sanctions
against trademark owners who drag legitimate domain name
registrants through ICANN's mandatory administrative
proceedings. Yes, there are some bad actors in the domain
name game, but ICANN's one-sided, anti-competitive and
intrusive UDRP earns it the 1999 title as First
Runner-Up. We award that body, whose authority and
legitimacy remain questionable, a moral compass to help
ICANN find its way through the intellectual property
thicket.
In
our opinion, the most significant event of the year in
the area of domain names occurred not in the courts and
not even within ICANN but in the U.S. Congress. The
Trademark
Cyberpiracy Prevention
Act,
a.k.a. Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act, was
signed into law by President Clinton on November 29. It
protects businesses from those who register company
trademarks and "confusingly similar" names as Internet
addresses in bad faith and then later try to sell them
for a profit. This contentious piece of legislation won
passage by attaching it as a rider to an omnibus bill on
federal spending.
Adoption
of the Anticybersquatting Act followed fierce lobbying by
political figures and celebrities, who complained that
their names were being used by unaffiliated parties to
direct people to pornography online. However, the
legislation permits a civil action by trademark holders
against a domain registrant on the basis of the name
registration alone, without regard to the goods or
services offered by the party. Trademark holders support
the law as a response to the piracy of business, product
and celebrity names that have significant commercial
value. The new "confusingly similar" standard offers a
much broader protective umbrella over such
names.
Another
view--ours and that of many others--is that the
legislation is an attempt to structure law to favor a
particular business model, while setting aside many
consumer and civil rights concerns. The
Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act, despite all
the fashionable buzzwords in its title, codifies a
trademark agenda in cyberspace. It grants all trademark
holders vast new rights at the expense of fair use and
free expression. We, therefore, bestow the 1999
Cyberserk Award upon the 106th U.S. Congress, who
gave us this controversial piece of legislation. In their
celebrated collective wisdom, these Congresscritters
furthered the notion that the Internet's primary purpose
is as a commercial medium and trademark owner's
playground, rather than a global communication
commons.
It
would be premature to claim the domain name industry came
of age in 1999. Cyberserkery was in evidence throughout
the year, and progress seemed a series of fits and
starts. This, of course, is in the nature of any new
medium or activity. We encourage the Internet community
to collect nominations for the next Cyberserk Awards
throughout the year. But 1999's awardees may be a hard
act to follow.
Copyright
© 2000 Ellen Rony
