Facebook to Begin Mediating Intractable Web Name Disputes

As has been widely noted in the blogosphere this week, Friday night Facebook will begin allowing users to register their own plain-language Facebook domain names, like facebook.com/bits.

Until now, Facebook’s profile pages were delineated by an awkward string of letters and numbers (”http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=500019730&”), which isn’t handily printed on business cards and doesn’t play well in search engines like Google.

Anticipating a frenetic land rush for the best names, Facebook says it will assign the new addresses on a first-come, first-serve basis, starting Friday at midnight, Eastern time. It is allowing trademark holders to fill out forms protecting their marks and says it will internally mediate all disputes.

Which may not stop things from getting ugly.

Icann, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, has been in the thick of quarrels over Web site names for more than a decade and has watched companies and lawyers generate waves of lawsuits over coveted URLs. Things became so ugly that in 1999, it began requiring Web site registrants to agree to participate in binding arbitration if any third party asserted a claim over the Web address in question.

Discussing the challenges ahead for Facebook, Tim Cole, Icann’s chief registrar liaison, said that even careful mediation processes will not prevent skirmishes from breaking out, and wondered if Facebook knew what it was getting itself into.

“This sounds like the early days when Network Solutions started doing domain registrations, and they didn’t anticipate the nature of the trademark issues that started arising and weren’t prepared for the flurry of lawsuits they started receiving,” Mr. Cole said. “It wouldn’t surprise me if the same thing happened here.”

The creativity of Facebook users, said Mr. Cole (a member of Facebook himself), should not be underestimated. “When someone registers something like ‘Facebook.com/MicrosoftSucks,’ what happens then?” He added that Facebook itself could come under legal fire by an aggrieved party who is not interested in waiting for a perceived trademark infringement to be resolved.

“Unless they have a really distinctive way to prevent abuses from arising, I have to believe disputes will arise fairly quickly as soon as people start registering names,” he said.

(the article was oringinally published at http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/12/facebook-to-begin-mediating-intractable-web-name-disputes/)