The news was known this week and put back on the table the operation of domain commerce, and what a generic domain offers to a brand: secured traffic on the Internet, that is, more business. But it also revitalized the dark world of cybersquatters, those who take advantage of cracks in the system that names URLs (Uniform Resource Locator) to make money.
According to an article published in the Spanish newspaper El País, today there are about 90 million dot-com domains, but there are few that are short, without numbers and easy to remember, something like the Bible of a winning domain. Juegos.com, the most expensive in Spanish, was sold in 2006 for $10 million. The most luxurious domain in history was insure.com, for which $11.4 million had been paid last year.
It is important for a company to have a domain related to its work or niche because there is the type-in user, which is the one who writes lanacion.com and puts it in or the one who searches for and writes sex.com. That translates into a lot of traffic almost for free," said Mariano Amartino, a consultant and author of the blog Uberbin.net.
A global example of how this industry works is sedo.com, a site dedicated to bringing domain buyers and sellers together. Its transfer volume reaches US$ 8 million per month, it has about 1.4 million users and 13.5 million domains in its database. It sells about 3000 every 30 days. How does the domain industry work in Argentina? Domain name registration is free, as are submissions to oppose an existing registration for usurpation. In addition to being free, no procedure in nic.ar (which depends on the Chancellery) needs a manager. "It is supposed to be in good faith, and that it is based on a legitimate interest on the part of the registrant," said Gustavo Soliño, coordinator of the agency. "The model was born in the country thinking about positioning the .ar domain, and it was achieved. While in Spain out of every 100 domains 50 are .es, and 50 generic, in Argentina out of every 100 domains 96 are .ar. This was achieved thanks to the gratuity. And although cybersquatting had the adverse effect, the regulations were gradually combating this scourge," he added.
The possession of domains is not exempt from fraud, such as that of the cybersquatter, who obtains the domain with the name of a brand or with one that is clearly associated with it with the sole purpose of selling it to its owners, often with ways that border on extortion. Soliño points out that since 2009, since the application of resolution 654/09, the protection of domain names nic.ar expanded. Until that time, only domain names that corresponded to natural or legal persons of public notoriety were protected.
The new regulations protect trademarks, song names (Sadaic), registrations in IGJ, AFIP and all official registrations. Also the names of the natural persons," he said.
As an example of the latter, he added that in Mexico a presentation to recover a brand name takes approximately six months and costs more than US $ 1500, while in the country it takes about a month and is free. "You simply need to complete the notes that are on the NIC.AR page and attach the certified evidentiary documentation," he said.
Currently, there are more than 2,200,000 registered names in Argentina, making it the largest registry in Latin America. The sale of domains is not prohibited but restricted by the aforementioned resolution 654/09 and by the limit established in 2008, by which the same person can not have more than 200 registered domains.
"It's a precarious right, not a permanent one," said Daniel Monastersky, a lawyer specializing in the rights of new technologies at techlaw. However, he clarified that "in the balance weighs more the trademark than the domain, which means that if someone registers a trademark with bad faith and for profit it is likely that the ownership will be revoked and transferred to the true owner."
Monastersky, a fraud prevention specialist and owner of the Stolen Identity site, warned that this is already being replicated on social media. As an example, he cited the case of a Twitter user who opened the account @israel, which, subsequently, was sold, without transcending the amount, to the government of that country.
Today, about 100 submissions are received per month from people who file an opposition to a domain name registered in Argentina. Among these emerged the cases of Carlos Reutemann, Federico Pinedo or the Fortabat Foundation.
"With the next implementation of the new registration system, a measure will also be promoted by which it will not be possible to renew domain names that are not hosted, that is, that the sites are active," Soliño said.
"The NIC.AR is handled with extreme uselessness," Amartino criticized. With the idea that it should be free the system has so many flaws that you can't believe it," he said.
"There are gigantic abuses of people with 60,000 domains in their name (or of third parties), who only register "animal" with scripts [programs designed for that] and then resell to companies or individuals looking for their own surname, the name of their signature or even generic words; and all for free, that is, you depend on a system that is bad because of its own inefficiency," said the consultant.
Source: La Nación
