Judge rules cybersquatter owes Trump $32G over domain names

Criticizing The Donald can cost you. A Canarsie cybersquatter who registered domain names related to Donald Trump and used them to skewer the real estate magnate must pay him $32,000 in damages, a Brooklyn judge ruled. J. Taikwok Yung first drew Trump’s rage in 2007 when he registered four websites — trumpindia.com, trumpbeijing.com, trumpabudhabi.com and trumpmumbai.com …

Comcast’s deal with Netflix makes network neutrality obsolete

For the past two decades, the Internet has operated as an unregulated, competitive free market. Given the tendency of networked industries to lapse into monopoly—think of AT&T’s 70-year hold over telephone service, for example—that’s a minor miracle. But recent developments are putting the Internet’s decentralized architecture in danger. In recent months, the nation’s largest residential …

Domain Registrar Name.com Suffers Data Breach

If you’ve encountered online scams before, you know that any email that addresses you by name, continues into a form letter and gives you a link to change your password stinks to high heaven. Imagine, then, how surprised Name.com customers must have felt to discover that such an email from the domain-name registrar and Web-hosting …

Facebook Agrees To Buy WhatsApp For $19bn

Facebook has agreed to buy the mobile messaging company WhatsApp for $19bn (£11.4bn), the social network has announced. The company said in a statement that it would pay $4bn (£2.4bn) in cash and $15bn (£9bn) in Facebook shares as part of the deal. The app’s founders and employees will get $3bn (£1.8bn) of the shares …

A step closer – impact of new generic top-level domains on brand owner rights

Several generic top-level domains (“gTLDs”) recently completed their Sunrise Periods, taking a step closer to realizing the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers’ (“ICANN’s”) gTLD expansion project from the existing 22 gTLDs (e.g. .com, .net, .org, .biz, etc.) to potentially 1,300 new gTLDs (i.e. arbitrary top-level domains). Read more Brand owners now face an uphill battle in …

EU Pushes to Globalize Internet Governance; too US-centric?

European Commission to Propose Steps to Curb U.S. Influence Over Key Web Functions, Commission says NSA revelations call into question US role in internet governance, which should be more global BRUSSELS—The European Union’s executive body is raising pressure to reduce U.S. influence over the Internet’s architecture amid what it called weakened confidence in the network’s …