Thursday, May 23, 2002

a thanks, and domain name abuse

Thanks to Larry Kestenbaum, from Polygon, the Dancing Bear, for sending some visitors our way, and for some interesting reading. It's great to see another blog addressing legal issues. Larry is a County Commissioner from Michigan who started his weblog this month while recovering from throat surgery. The Polygon entry from May 14th on domain name abuse includes a number of links to articles about when domain names lapse through accident or inattention, and someone else takes control. I'm going to include a couple of those here, but make certain to visit the Polygon site for the analysis of the issues there.

Two of the articles linked to on Polygon are from Harvard Student Ben Edelman. The first, Domains Reregistered for Distribution of Unrelated Content: A Case Study of "Tina's Free Live Webcam" examines the subject from a statistical and economics based approach. The second article, Large-Scale Intentional Invalid WHOIS Data: A Case Study of "NicGod Productions" / "Domains For Sale", covers "large-scale domain registrations" by companies that intentionally submit inaccurate whois information. The articles have been written to help groups deciding policy issues on domain registration, such as ICANN, and contain a number of thought-provoking observations.

Again, thank you Larry, and best wishes towards a speedy recovery.