[registrars] DEFECTIVE Sunrise Queue parsing by Afilias - My Observations

["Bhavin Turakhia" <bhavin.t@directi.com>]

In the past 24 hours I believe Afilias Staff has had little sleep thanks to
thousands of calls Afilias has been inundated with and for good reason. The
entire purpose of the sunrise queue, which was to protect Trademarked domain
owners, has been misutilised due to gross negligence on the part of Afilias
in processing these applications. Some observations that I have made in the
past 24 hours having done Whois after whois on various Domain Names

===============
MY OBSERVATIONS
===============

1. Out of every RANDOM generic word i did whois queries on - more than 4/5
were OBVIOUSLY fradulent trademarks - some of these i list below

Domain Name: bank.info
Created On: 2001-07-31 20:43:58.0 GMT
Expiration Date: 2006-07-31 20:43:58.0 GMT
Trademark Name: DAvinder Singh
Trademark Date: 2001-01-01
Trademark Country: US
Trademark Number: us123456789
Sponsoring Registrar: 5027-BR
Registrant Name: David Singh

* NOTE THE TRADEMARK NAME AND DATE NUMBER ABV

Domain Name: books.info
Created On: 2001-07-31 19:46:33.0 GMT
Expiration Date: 2006-07-31 19:46:33.0 GMT
Trademark Name: pro-consul, Inc
Trademark Date: 2001-01-01
Trademark Country: US
Trademark Number: US1597351
Sponsoring Registrar: 5027-BR
Registrant Name: David Singh

* NOTE THE TRADEMARK NAME AND DATE ABV

Domain Name: analsex.info
Created On: 2001-07-30 20:22:25.0 GMT
Expiration Date: 2006-07-30 20:22:25.0 GMT
Trademark Name: Sandip Singh Sandhu
Trademark Date: 1999-11-09
Trademark Country: MA
Trademark Number: 75913
Sponsoring Registrar: 5005-OD

* NOTE THE TRADEMARK NAME ABV

Domain Name: newyork.info
Created On: 2001-07-31 20:52:23.0 GMT
Expiration Date: 2006-07-31 20:52:23.0 GMT
Trademark Name: newyork
Trademark Date: 2000-10-01
Trademark Country: US
Trademark Number: e.g. 12345
Sponsoring Registrar: 5117-NS

* NOTE THE TRADEMARK NUMBER ABV

Domain Name: family.info
Created On: 2001-07-31 21:24:50.0 GMT
Expiration Date: 2006-07-31 21:24:50.0 GMT
Trademark Name: none
Trademark Date: 2001-07-30
Trademark Country: US
Trademark Number: none

* DO I NEED TO SAY ANYTHING FOR THIS ONE??

2. I challenge anyone to achieve greater than 1/10 ratio in searching for
generic names that are available. seems like EVERY generic name in the world
is booked under trademarks

3. Every state i can think of and country i can think of seems to be
trademarked (which i thought was not possible)

4. Afilias could have easily prevented a large percentage of these by
enforcing the various rules they had set

* Trademarked name should be similar to domain name
* Trademarked date should before Oct 2000
* Trademark number should be unique in same country

5. As of right now the only solution that Afilias offers is the so called
sunrise challenge process, which for some funny twisted reason involves both
the challenger and the challengee paying $295 each. Which means thousands
and thousands of these squatters who have gained these domains by direct
fraud will actually get away with it since the cost of challenging them
itself is expensive and another revenue opportunity for WIPO/afilias rather
than a resolution measure

6. I agree that Afilias cannot track down trademarks from various countries
but they should atleast have had a standard enforcement preventing names
with crap trademark data such as abv. all the abv could be parsed as wrong
data by any simple two bit computer code

7. I want to further analyse why afilias didnt do the abv parsing and
enforce the basic rules they had themselves laid out. i cannot hint of a
motive, dont want to either but think of this - afilias gets 5 YEAR REG fee
for each sunrise name. So what if they are fraud names. thats 5 years of
revenue in their pockets. add to tht that these names will be disputed soon.
that adds the dispute fee to this. now once the domain is dropped it would
be picked up again by someone, which adds another 2 year reg fee to it. so
by not parsing the trademarked info afilias has managed to make extra money
rather than losing out

8. Lets also give Afilias a benefit of doubt when they tell me that they had
decided not to ensure a check for any of the trademark info. However that is
not true. incidentally the only one TRADEMARK field that is checked for
validity is the COUNTRY FIELD. SO WHY DID THEY PUT A CHECK ON THE TRADEMARK
country field and ensure that it was valid, but DID NOT CHECK the date
validity or the trademark name validity or the trademark NUMBER validity? if
one of the fields was checked so should the others have been. however the
country field is theonly one that does not make a difference to those
committing fraud. the other fields do and those were the exact fields not
validated by the afilias registry.

9. lets also consider the difficulty of implementing the automated checks.
all afilias had to do was make sure that

(a) the trademarked name was same as the domain name. so in the abv
bank.info case i showed it would show up as an obvious fraud

(b) the trademark date was less than oct 2000. So it would immediately
eliminate those domains which were wrongly registered with dates

(c) the trademark number was a number

(d) no two trademark numbers from the same country were same - if they were
those domains would be put on special hold

All of the above could be easily achieved in less than 5 minutes of
programming.

10. Lets now for a moment analyse that HAD AFILIAS done those checks, what
difference would it have made to the whole process. I have a docment with me
that shows 100 names which i picked totally randomly, of which over 25 are
OBVIOUSLY WRONG. So what i am saying is by putting in TWO SIMPLE CHECKS
afilias could have prevented 25% of the fradulent entries but chose not to

11. If they had done the duplicate trademark number check they would have
elminated another 25-30% of the fraud most of the names i did a whois on
show the same fradulent person trying to register various names using the
same fradulent information

12. Had they done the other validity checks they would have further
eliminated another 25-30% of the fraud

13. Out of those 100 domains over 33 are us registered marks. A simple HTTP
GET request to TESS database hosted online shows most of them to be
fradulent. So had afilias simply added this one more check to verify against
the TESS query database it would elminate 33% of the fraud

14. Check this one out. Do a whois on careers, dating, divorce,
entertainment and cosmetics.info. I have two of them below -

Domain Name: careers.info
Trademark Name: careers
Trademark Country: IL
Trademark Number: 153278563

Domain Name: dating.info
Trademark Name: dating
Trademark Country: IL
Trademark Number: 153278563

Notice that the trademark number, country, and person are same for the
different trademarks. Isnt that a wonderful coincidence. I found all these
names randomly - think of how many more the same person or others with this
trick would have registered that i havent yet found.

15. Afilias never really publicised a system that would ward of fradulent
perpetrators. Infact their system encouraged fraud. Think of me as a
fradulent registrant. What hav i got to lose. Afailias allows me to put any
junk in the trademark info so i can go ahead and do that without any loss.
If someone wants to challenge me they must fork out $295, so for a generic
term which is noones company etc there would be few willing to fork out
$295. at the end of it i could probably challenge myself and get the domain
myself

==========================
MY PROPOSAL FOR RESOLUTION
==========================

* Afilias should stop processing any further queues

* Afilias should immediately remove all domains which have been fradulently
registered, and as a lesson probably not refund that amount so the end
customer pays the price by trying the fraud

* Afilias should publicise the fact that fradulent registrants will pay
dearly by losing their money. This infact was a less publicised fact. Infact
what was more publicised, and which is what caused this issue in the first
place was the fact that anyone can go ahead and get ANY domain with ANY CRAP
info and noone can stop you and if someone does want to stop you THEY HAVE
TO PAY $295 to do that.

* Afilias should make a easier zero cost system for reporting obvious fraud
where trademark info is fraudulent

* Afilias should delay the Landrush until the above is resolved

Best Regards
Bhavin Turakhia
CEO
Directi
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91-22-6372982/3276/0256/3332
http://www.directi.com
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