France.com owner has sued the French government since 1994 for confiscating the domain

    On March 12, 2018, France.com suddenly went offline. For 24 years, he worked as a tourist showcase of a commercial travel agency and allowed him to book tickets for travels in France. The owner, Jean-Noel Friedman, an American citizen, registered him in 1994, a few years after domain registration became generally public. Since then, he has had a fairly profitable business. To protect the asset, he even registered the corresponding trademark. France.com Inc. officially registered in California.

    But everything changed on March 12, 2018, when the American company Web.com “suddenly transferred ownership of the domain to the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The company did this without any formal notice to Friedman and without compensation. ” Just one day the site stopped working, and emails were not delivered to the address.

    Currently, france.com redirects visitors to france.fr , which is owned by the French Foreign Ministry. The former owner of the domain regards this as an illegal seizure of property, especially since the .com domain was located in the international commercial domain zone, which is not related to French jurisdiction. Jean-Noel Friedman intends to restore justice - and is now suing with the French government and several hosting providers, hoping to get the business back.

    For almost a quarter of a century of its existence, the site has undergone several incarnations. For some time he worked as a site with news about France, including for paid subscribers, but then he finally decided on self-identification as a travel agency: he worked for many years. With an audience of about 100 thousand people a month, the site generated revenue on commission deductions. What is characteristic, there have never been any complaints to Friedman and his project. The French Tourism Bureau collaborated with him, and in 2009 even awarded the “Best Website” award. But it looks like the foreign ministry changed its mind in 2016. Without even putting forward commercial offers to buy the domain from the owner, it immediately sued - and in July 2016 the Supreme Court of Paris ordered Friedman to transfer the domain to the French government under the threat of a fine.

    The decision was upheld by the court of appeal in September 2017 , and now it is appealed to the French Supreme Court.

    Friedman assumed that until the end of the litigation, he would retain control of the domain, even if the fine was paid, as the court of first instance decided. However, at some point, the French authorities sent a direct order to the registrar Web.com - and that was enough. The registrar dutifully transferred the domain to the new owner. To make matters worse, registration was transferred from the American Web.com registrar to the French OVH, which would rather comply with decisions of French, rather than American, courts.

    There is some irony in the fact that this operation was performed by a company called Web.com, because it does not own the web. Maybe Sir Tim Berners-Lee (the inventor of WWW) can help do the same to herself?

    This is not the first time that a large corporation is trying to select a domain registered to an individual. A notable precedent is the milka.fr domain in Milka v. Kraft Foods . A woman named Milka registered the milka.fr domain and used it for her business for a while before Kraft Foods noticed this and sued. The court sided with big business. Another use case is the nissan.com domain . The Japanese auto giant Nissan Motor tried to take away the nissan.com domain registered in 1994 from Uzi Nissan, the founder and owner of Nissan Computer Corp., and demanded payment of $ 10 million in compensation, but in this case the big business lost .

    But for government authorities to seize the domain from a private owner in the .com zone - this, it seems, did not happen at all. The USA.com, Canada.com and Germany.com domains are owned by individuals, the Russia.com domain is the same travel site as France.com was and is owned by Russia.com Inc., registered in the UK .

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