Category: Domain Name Law

Domain hijacking—the unauthorized transfer or theft of a domain name—represents one of the most serious and costly risks in the digital asset ecosystem. As domains increasingly serve as mission-critical infrastructure for businesses, brands, and revenue-generating platforms, losing control over a domain name can mean website outages, email failures, reputational damage, and even the compromise of…

In the world of domain name registration, protecting the identity and contact information of registrants has long been a priority for individuals and businesses alike. This need has given rise to two distinct mechanisms: WHOIS privacy services and proxy services. While both are designed to shield the personal or organizational details of domain owners from…

Domain name portfolio holders—whether investors, developers, resellers, or brand managers—often overlook a serious risk that has become increasingly scrutinized by registries, registrars, and global regulators: liability arising from DNS abuse linked to domains under their control. DNS abuse, broadly defined, includes domain-related activity such as phishing, malware distribution, botnet command-and-control, spam infrastructure, and domain generation…

The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), enacted in the United States in 1998 and enforced by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), imposes specific legal obligations on operators of websites and online services that are either directed to children under the age of 13 or knowingly collect personal information from such children. For domain name…

Trademark watch services are an essential but often overlooked tool for brand owners, domain investors, and intellectual property professionals who seek to safeguard their rights in a fast-moving, increasingly globalized digital environment. At their core, these services monitor trademark databases, domain registrations, and internet content to alert rights holders when identical or confusingly similar marks…

In the competitive world of domain name acquisitions, high-value or strategically relevant domain names often attract multiple interested buyers. As competition intensifies—particularly in premium or brandable domains—disputes may arise not just between buyers and sellers, but among buyers themselves. One of the more nuanced legal issues in such cases is tortious interference, a civil tort…

The intersection of litigation finance and high-value domain name disputes has become an increasingly prominent development in the broader digital asset legal landscape. As domain names evolve into multimillion-dollar assets—sometimes outperforming traditional real estate or securities in returns—litigants have begun leveraging third-party funding to pursue or defend claims involving contested ownership, contract breaches, fraud, or…

As blockchain-based domain systems—often referred to as Web3 domains—continue to gain popularity, a legal and technical collision is brewing between these decentralized naming protocols and the globally coordinated, ICANN-managed Domain Name System (DNS). The risks are not merely speculative. As competing systems attempt to resolve human-readable names in different ways, the chance of name collisions—where…

Universal Acceptance (UA) is a foundational technical and policy goal for the evolving global Internet infrastructure, yet it remains one of the most persistent challenges facing Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) and new generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs). In theory, Universal Acceptance means that all valid domain names and email addresses—regardless of script, length, or structure—should be…

The convergence of domain names and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) has introduced a new frontier in digital asset innovation—but it has also raised serious questions under U.S. and international securities law. As NFT-linked domains proliferate across blockchain-based naming systems such as Ethereum Name Service (ENS), Unstoppable Domains, and newer entrants building on Solana or Polygon, regulators…