[Foundation-l] Wikimedia domains, SOPA, Godaddy and MarkMonitor

[MZMcBride]

Michael Peel wrote:
> I'd like to see more information here. What activities are MarkMonitor
> involved in with the 'anti-piracy fight'? Are they involved in filtering all
> peer-to-peer traffic, or just the traffic that contravenes copyright law? As a
> domain name supplier, what is their relation to ISPs, and how do they
> practically provide this filtering? What evidence do they supply to copyright
> holders - I assume that this evidence is related to who has registered which
> domain, since (as domain name providers) they shouldn't be in a position to
> provide any other (non-public) information here? How do they monitor titles?

Did you do any quick research before asking these questions?

> I'm asking this out of genuine interest. My understanding of domain name
> providers in general is that they provide a service that simply says "this
> domain name points to the server at this IP address", rather than them having
> any role in filtering, providing evidence, or monitoring.  I'm rather
> surprised to hear that their activities go beyond this.

MarkMonitor isn't a typical domain registrar. It's a component of what they
do, but they're quite explicitly a "brand protection service." A very large
part of Web brands just happens to be their domain names.

I did some quick research. It looks like MarkMonitor has been involved with
a lot of major companies, including Facebook (hi Domas!), Google, and now
the Wikimedia Foundation
(<https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:MarkMonitor>). There were
rumors that MarkMonitor was also involved in the acquisition of mobileme.com
and me.com for Apple.

http://arst.ch/nu2 was an interesting take on one of the company's reports.
I guess they pissed off RapidShare pretty badly at some point.

> I'm all in favour of moving the Wikimedia domain names from GoDaddy to
> MarkMonitor (and, tbh, I'm rather puzzled by why the WMF decided to use
> GoDaddy in the first place), I'm just rather puzzled by your statements here.

Byproduct of history, I imagine. It used to be that it didn't really matter
where you registered a domain, as long as they were competent enough to keep
it registered and handle your whois data. In most cases and for most people,
this is still true. I vaguely recall some major site being interrupted
within the past year because their domain registration password (on a site
like GoDaddy or HostGator or wherever) was incredibly weak. You'd be
surprised what kinds of domains are registered where. :-)

MZMcBride