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People who have registered a .info domain name without legally owning it will be challenged, according to Roland LaPlante, chief marketing officer at .info's administrating company Afilias. Afilias is currently based in Pennsylvania but will move its headquarters to Dublin at the end of the year.
Tuesday's moves by the company follow reports last week which alleged that many individuals and organisations had registered .info domain names during Afilias' "sunrise" period using bogus information. The sunrise period was intended to let legal owners of names register a Web site address before that name was opened to the general public. It is expected that cyber-squatters who have improperly registered names have done so in order to sell the valuable Web addresses to corporations at a later date for profit.
LaPlante said that allegations that the registration process was a fiasco and that Afilias was incompetent were untrue. "This will all be fine," he claimed.
The BBC on-line reported on Friday that a quarter of all registrations for the new domain name were fraudulent. "It's hard to tell if that is true," LaPlante said on Tuesday. "I just don't know how many of the 52,245 registrants don't legally own the name."
So far 500 registered Web names have been challenged in front of the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO). "We expect a bunch of more challenges in the near future," LaPlante told ElectricNews.Net. "People who claim to own a name that has been registered under the .info domain have until December 26 to issue a challenge."
"But we will also start combing all the registrations ourselves," LaPlante added. "And if there are registrations that don't look right to us, we will almost certainly issue a challenge. The registrants will have the burden of proof if they maintain that they own the name," he said.
LaPlante went on to say that if the challenge is successful and the name becomes available again, third parties have until February or March to prove that the name is legally theirs. "People will have ample opportunity to right the wrong."
LaPlante denied the possibly that that squatters may sell the names before a legal challenge could be mounted. He said that names are not eligible for transfer for six months, and said it would be impossible to sell them before that time.
LaPlante also denies claims that Afilias is to blame for the high number of bogus registrations. "There isn't a lot more that we could have done. There is no worldwide databank for domain names. We knew in advance that we were not going to screen all the registrations."
He stressed that the vast majority of the registrations is legitimate. "But it is true that no process is perfect. It is too bad that some people try to circumvent the regulations."
Afilias' new headquarters will open in Dublin before the end of this year and will employ around a dozen of people in the first year.
For more information visit the World Intellectual Property Organisation at http://www.wipo.int or Afilias at http://www.afilias.info
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