AppDetex has sent a letter to the ICANN top management in which it complains about the behavior of domain registrars. AppDetex is an ICANN-accredited registrar, but it focuses on protecting trademarks and tradenames in the domain space. The company’s most famous client is Facebook. Experts at AppDetex have developed software that scans registered domain names in search of similar brand names. If such similarities are found, a request to disclose registrant’s data is sent to the registrar of this brand name. The publication of this data in Whois is prohibited by the newly adopted General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), but ICANN’s temporary rules allow registrars to reveal this information if the request is legitimate.
In fact, according to AppDetex, this is not happening. The company informed ICANN that it sent some 9,000 requests to registrars. In 11.4 percent of cases, registrars said that they would hand over the data only by a court decision. In 0.4 percent cases, registrars sought payment for revealing data. And 60 percent of the requests were simply ignored. As a result, AppDetex managed to obtain the data in only 3 percent of cases, Domain Incite reports.
However, registrars believe that the practice of sending out automated requests to reveal user data is wrong, and that the algorithms utilized by AppDetex are far from perfect. Thus, the large registrar Tucows sent a letter to ICANN claiming that many requests from AppDetex are pointless. An example is the request to hand over information about the grifflnstafford.com registrant: AppDetex algorithms saw the use of the word Insta, which is a Facebook trademark. According to the registrar, such requests only complicate the work and do not help protect intellectually property in any way. We cannot disagree with that.
