What The France?
Domain names are a vital part of today's businesses and they are your shop window onto the world wide web. Not only do you have to defend them from competitors and scammers, you now have to defend them from governments as well.
Jean-Noel Frydman is a New Yorker who used france.com to build a "digital kiosk" for Americans interested in France. The site has long offered holiday bookings, travel advice, and updates from Le Monde, and in 2009, the French tourism agency awarded france.com a best website award.
Frydman registered the domain name france.com back in 1994, at a time when few people had even heard of the internet, and dot com domain names were exclusively reserved for private companies. There is documented proof on archive.org of it being an active website as far back as 1996, (the year archive.org was itself founded) making france.com one of the oldest continuously operating websites on the net.
But in March 2018, some 24 years after starting the project, Frydman was shocked to discover that his website had gone dark overnight and none of his email addresses were working anymore. It came as a greater shock to discover that this was because the domain had been transferred to the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, following a seizure notice by them which argued that the domain name was violating French government trademarks in its use of the word "france", and that the domain was the rightful property of France.
Frydman is a US citizen and his domain was registered in the USA. He also registered FRANCE.COM in the US Trademarks database. There was no evidence that Frydman was in any way cyber-squatting with the domain, attempting to deceive people into thinking this was an official French government site, or doing anything other than running a legitimate business in the USA. The French government may not like it that they didn't think to register the name themselves, and they may not want to pay the fair price for such a premium domain name with 100,000 monthly visitors, a good reputation, and twenty years worth of link-building, but that shouldn't entitle them to use government muscle to just take it.
Frydman is now suing the French government in an attempt to get his domain name back, or to gain fair compensation, but at best it is going to be a long drawn-out and expensive process. Given that the domain is now controlled by a French registrar, no US court order can force a reversal. Meanwhile Frydman's business (and one which massively benefited the French tourism industry) is inoperative and a customer base built up over more than twenty years is eroding day by day. It isn't clear why the French government felt it needed the domain name. All it has done with france.com is redirect visitors to the existing government website, france.fr. It should also be noted that it hasn't seized the dormant france.org, france.net, or france.info, and whilst it has registered france.eu, it has not done anything with it, not even pointed it at the government website.
30th May 2018
This article comes from the SKILLZONE email newsletter, published monthly since January 2008, and covering topics related to technology and the internet. All articles and artwork in the SKILLZONE newsletter are orignal content.