Legal Matters: Keep It in Your Domain

However, in 1999, two developments changed the legal landscape:

1. Congress enacted the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act of 1999 (also known as the Truth in Domain Names Act). This enables trademark owners to sue in federal court to recover domain names, including the right to bring action against the domain name itself, even if the registrant is beyond the jurisdictional reach of the federal courts.
2. ICANN rolled out a contractual method for resolving ownership disputes, called the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP). As a condition of obtaining a domain name, every registrant must agree to submit to an arbitration process to determine whether it’s entitled to maintain a domain name similar to another company’s trademark. This process applies to all generic, top-level domains, which include the ubiquitous “.com” as well as “.net,” “.org,” “.biz” and others.