Well, it feels weird to defend Instagram, but here we go. The important lines from the article are these ones:
> Instagram confirmed to Newsbeat that Kevin's handle had been changed in line with its policy.
> It allows it to make changes to an account if it's been inactive for a certain amount of time.
I tried going to the guy's new Instagram [1], but couldn't see any posts there at all. I visited his Twitter [2] instead, and except for a few posts he made from the exciting run in the last 24 hours, he hadn't tweeted since 2013.
I don't think they did a bad thing here — it's their platform, and they have some incentive to encourage a more lively and current community. Although it seems minor, one facet of this might be to help big users reclaim better names from the huge pool of defunct ones out there, especially given that Instagram has gotten so big that finding anything that's not a conflict is difficult.
Why does the absence of posts indicate inactivity? He said in the article he uses it to like posts, but not create content. That doesn't sound inactive to me.
In fact, Instagram basically encourages this type of account use. Any time you try to browse the site they try to get you to sign-up, even if you have zero intention of making your own posts.
It sounds like the guy would have given the account name over either way, so why couldn't they have simply contacted him first and asked?
"would you give up your account name"
"No"
"We have changed your account name"
Is 10x worse than "we have changed your account name". If you're going to do something and there aren't any alternatives don't act like it's a question unless an extremely high ratio will say yes.
But as far as I know, US citizens[1] don't recognize sovereignty of the British Crown since 1776… In that particular days, they even ratified a text saying “that all men are created equal”.
[1] (and Instagram is owned byt a majority of American citizens)
Sure will you give up all my data, metadata and shadow profile? Oh and don’t forget to forward me all funds you have made selling my data and or serving me Ads to date.
I’d really like ICANN to take away the Instagram domain and reassign it to some royals at their request while we are at it.
I'm not talking about proposing a false question under the pretense that you're going to take it regardless of the answer.
Your assumption that Instagram can grab anything they want just shows the normalcy of this type of behavior. Maybe we, as the consumers of these products, should step up and say that is not cool? If you do it to that person, what is to stop you from doing it to another in the future, to me?
I think it should also be a signal to any one that creates a brand, a business, on Instagram. Instagram can instantly snatch your livelihood without even contacting you.
I'm proposing people being human and remembering that just because a URL path might be a technical creation, there is still a human being behind that and we should treat people as we want to be treated.
> Instagram has gotten so big that finding anything that's not a conflict is difficult.
I don't understand online services' obsession with making sure public-facing identifiers are unique. This is not close to true in any other area. How many British guys can be named Harry?
If there could be two World of Warcraft toons named Joe, maybe there wouldn't be so many xX_KillStealr69_Xx-es running around.
Wouldn’t the same issue apply to email addresses or domain names? At some point there needs to be a unique identifier or ID to locate the right destination.
How else could this be accomplished, especially when we are talking about URL structures that need to be somewhat short in length?
Blizzard accounts are Unique only in that they have a unique number appended to the end. For example there can be many 'eeeeeeeeeeeee' accounts, but only one 'eeeeeeeeeeeee#1432'. The games only show 'eeeeeeeeeeeee' during play.
Discord takes this approach as well and it seems to work fine there.
I tend to like the approach Valve takes with Steam, which is to completely separate the "account name" (unique, unchangeable) from the "display name" (non-unique, change more or less as often as you want).
It is kind of weird that the account name is unchangeable since it's really only visible to the account holder and not tied to anything else. I agree that it should be unique since it's a sign-on credential but it really ought to be a label for the account number.
In this particular case, I'm guessing -- based on the URLs -- that in order to have the Instagram username "sussexroyal", it's also necessary to be located at www.instagram.com/sussexroyal . This is a design mistake. The URL identifier does not need to be the public-facing identifier, and it shouldn't be. You can have the Duke of Sussex as sussexroyal at www.instagram.com/y6llflk9 and the guy in Sussex who roots for the Royals as sussexroyal at www.instagram.com/y2q9g6uo .
There is no need to have the public-facing identifier be the unique identifier, nor is there a good reason to do it. ICQ got this right, way back at the beginning. But somehow everyone forgot.
> There is no need to have the public-facing identifier be the unique identifier
Yeah, there is: it's a major UX improvement, because the URLs at issue are entry-point URLs, which need friendly names for the same reason domains for public-facing services (which are key components of entry-point URLs) do.
It's true that in the general case objects don't necessarily need a URL component that matches their friendly name, but this is not the general case.
It seems like a major UX improvement, but is somebody looking for Prince Harry's Instagram account going to know http://www.instragram.com/sussexroyal, or are they going to enter the app and search "Prince Harry", click the first link, and then "Favorite" that account for future reference?
I know I personally very rarely type a direct URL. Either it's already bookmarked, or I google it.
But instagram.com/sussexroyal is a much more memorable URL than instagram.com/y2q9g6uo, and being able to find someone from remembering their handle is much better than remembering the handle and then wondering which of the multiple people called sussexroyal you're after when the search results come through
Needless to say, the most prominent and memorable identifier being non-unique has all sorts of uses for trolls and spambots too.
> instagram.com/sussexroyal is a much more memorable URL than instagram.com/y2q9g6uo
Since there are a limited number of memorable names available, anyone late to the party gets stuck with non-memorable names. Why not even the playing field?
Sure, but Instagram isn't an email or domain name provider, so the point is that it doesn't _have_ to have this problem.
It's opted in to the problem by deciding that display names need to be unique. It's not right or wrong, it's apparently just been decided that that's desirable for the product.
Ahh yes, nothing more lively and current than watching senior citizens coo over monarchs.
In all seriousness, this is just another step towards instagram being another bland reflection of the media fun house in which we all live: famous people get air time to pimp products and movements.
> In all seriousness, this is just another step towards instagram being another bland reflection of the media fun house in which we all live: famous people get air time to pimp products and movements.
???
Instagram is a mainstream everything-is-an-ad site and has been since I've first heard of it.
Yeah, zero posts and doesn’t even have a profile pic. It’s a dead account, I don’t have much of an issue with Instagram’s policy to “steal” handles on accounts like this.
This goes to show that "your" handle on someone else's platform is never really yours. The only thing that can not be taken away from you is a domain name. Start hosting your voice via your own domain.
Certainly not a 100% fail-safe solution – I see people already listing domains that were seized for various inexcusable reasons – but the Nissan.com case [0] (Nissan the car company vs. Mr. Nissan the run-of-the-mill computer sales guy) comes to mind as a classic (and fascinating) counterexample.
Madonna Ciccone famously thefted the Madonna.com domain away from Dan Parisi on the ridiculous basis that she somehow magically had a deserving claim on the domain due to her trademark of "Madonna" related to "entertainment services and related goods."
>The only plausible explanation for Respondent's actions appears to be an intentional effort to trade upon the fame of Complainant's name and mark for commercial gain. That purpose is a violation of the Policy, as well as U.S. Trademark Law.
>[...] In the Sting decision there was evidence that the Respondent had made bona fide use of the name Sting prior to obtaining the domain name registration and there was no indication that he was seeking to trade on the good will of the well-known singer.
>Because the evidence shows a deliberate attempt by Respondent to trade on Complainant's fame for commercial purposes, we find that Complainant has satisfied the requirements of Paragraph 4(a)(iii) of the Policy.
She got the domain because he couldn't bring up a single non-Madonna-the-Singer reason for plopping $20,000 down to buy the domain.
Yikes. Like I said, domains are still far from fail-safe. The Madonna theft was almost 20 years ago, when trademarks seem to have reigned supreme in court, so hopefully more judges are better informed today and know this is unacceptable and not how the internet operates anymore...
Domain names can be taken away too, especially ccTLDs. It is harder to seize a domain, but as we have seen time and time again with TPB, Sci-Hub, Wikileaks, etc. you can lose your domain if entities with enough power and influence want it seized.
I'm not sure that 'especially' applies to ccTLDs any more than gTLDs. Especially since most (all?) gTLDs are covered by the same jurisdiction as the .us ccTLD.
Actually gTLDs are restricted by their contract with ICANN (registry agreement (RA), search google for "ICANN RA"). ccTLDs however merely give lip service to domain registration norms, but as there is no contract beyond "this registry is yours to run" ccTLDs have far more leeway (public pressure sometimes withstanding) to do as they please. It is for reasons similar to this that a fair number of ccTLDs don't run EPP for example (running an EPP service is a requirement in the gTLD contract).
EDIT: further explanation of the gTLD registry agreement
In the context of accidental domain loss / attempted hijacking, absolutely agree on all of your points.
In the case of "entities with enough power and influence", I don't think any of the ICANN RA requirements make gTLDs any less likely to being seized than any ccTLDs.
A domain name can be taken away. Check the Terms & Conditions for most country related domains, but specifically the newly popular ones: .io, .ai, .al, etc. they specifically mention if not being used they can revoke.
> All registered domains must be set in use within one year, otherwise the .AL Registry has the right to suspend them.
Domains are a whole different ball game thought, I've seen instances of domain names being seized for legal reasons (ie FBI seizing domains of torrent sites), but if the UK govt wanted to seize say sussexroyal.com (which btw is available on GoDaddy right now or a cool $70), that would be a much bigger ordeal of going through ICANN vs just "asking" Instagram
He mentioned that he was able to keep his twitter handle and that's most likely because Twitter doesn't pull this sort of shit. I remember a few years back Israel wanted to the twitter handle "@israel" for their official twitter account, asked twitter and they would not hand it over from the original user. I think they ended up paying the original user something like $500k for the handle, which IMO was a damn good deal for the user.
> I think they ended up paying the original user something like $500k for the handle, which IMO was a damn good deal for the user.
I've always wondered such deals could just be bait for a user to violate the Twitter terms of service, and therefore free the username up for others to use.
That account had value and this is a poor business practice. Courts award value and the damages are to make a point that its a bad practice if the judge/regulator finds it disturbing. Assuming that the judge / consumer regulator will say "well but you clicked I agree" is a bad assumption, ESPECIALLY when European countries are involved. the company is just as likely to axe that contract logic and just lean on their severability clause to keep the rest of the contract without self-granting the ability to reassign accounts.
Instagram would be in a better place if it generally brokered and escrowed account trading on its platform, and took a fee from that.
A while back, an Instagram employee stole the handle from my buddy’s wife. The only reason he got it back was because he had enough clout in the design community that he was able to get some press about it: https://medium.com/@behoff/they-say-nothing-will-change-5c54...
Github yanked away my 4 character username to hand it over to some hipster startup.
My account was 10 years old, no published repos, but consistent other activity. I don't have the desire nor the connections stir up a twitrage, but I'll certainly make their behavior known on HN.
These companies point to "inactivity", yet there is never any attempt to contact beforehand. The policy is merely a thin justification to do whatever the heck they want to suit corporate or personal employee whims.
That's SaaS (Surveillance as a Sharecropper) for ya.
Josh Williams had a startup bought, became a tech exec at Facebook, and hijacked my two letter instagram name that I had since 2012 because he wanted the vanity of @jw on every thing he can get his grubby hands on.
I had a two letter tumblr URL that got two serious corporate requests for purchase, including one from a huge European telecommunications company. I always counter offered a crazy high number to test their budget. Both times they thanked me for the response and moved on.
I had a couple tumblr employees following me, cool people. I even had the founder “like” a couple of my posts. My sense was that there wasn’t an avenue open to poach a day-one user like me. This was all pre-yahoo.
Eventually, when I was done with the site more or less, I put out a feeler for a buyer and made a quick buck. That buyer I think tried to sell it themselves and it ended up shuttered.
Good times. Tumblr had a fun niche art community at the time and my “tumblr fame” helped me network with some interesting people.
We may not have the full story here, but it doesn't seem like Instagram is disputing that they simply took it. I don't see anyone suggesting that they even attempted to contact the guy first. Outrageously poor way to handle things. Also, at what point does an Instagram account become "inactive"?
Instagram doesn't specify a time for an account to be considered "inactive".
> An account is determined to be inactive based on a number of things, including the date the account was created and whether the account has been sharing photos, commenting on photos, liking photos and logging in.
I think it's more specifically something like this, in case anyone is actually wondering:
"When rich and famous people want your handle bad enough to shell-out money to a PR firm who has spent a boatload on Twitter ads to establish a very favorable business relationship that allows them to procure already-in-use accounts for their clients with a simple request to their account manager at Twitter."
I saw this happen for a small startup I worked at some years back who hired a PR firm and instantly were able to take control of a twitter account that we'd been denied access to for _years_. It was inactive with like 8 porn posts and nothing in the last 5 years, and we sent in formal verification of our trademark, and I also reached out through back channel tech contacts who put in internal requests, and we still got denied 3 times over about a year period. We hired a PR firm to run a marketing campaign for something unrelated to Twitter, and on like day 2 of the relationship, they reached out and basically just off hand said "oh yeah btw we reached out to Twitter and got control of this account for you, I think it matches your company name more directly if you want it!" We hadn't even asked them about it.
And what were they going to tell the guy? It's not like they were going to give him a choice, or offer him restitution.
Not doing something like this leads to stupid stuff like having POTUS' handle be "real donald trump" (yes, I know choosing that handle predates his being POTUS, but you get the idea).
> Not doing something like this leads to stupid stuff like having POTUS' handle be "real donald trump" (yes, I know choosing that handle predates his being POTUS, but you get the idea).
I actually find this a charming reminder of the old days of the web. there's a certain populist quality to the idea that no one is important enough to snatch a particular username that some commoner took first. I agree situations like @realdonaldtrump are kind of silly, but it doesn't hurt anyone. anyone who actually has a large audience has a verified account so there's little doubt regarding who actually controls it.
that said, we really do need a responsible way to reclaim truly inactive accounts without enabling "reset my password via email" type attacks.
You're suggesting that there is no other appropriate handle they could have come up with beyond "sussexroyal"? And beyond that, what gives one person the right more than any other to a particular handle? Even with your POTUS example.
So yes, I think they should have at least asked first and tried to resolve it amicably.
So if someone becomes president, they should be able to take my handles? Seems worse to be so egregiously unfair.
No one should be able to get something any more than any one else. Of course that’ll never be the case. But why excuse the behavior and even encourage it?
The only surprising thing here is that it's not even that good of a name. I understand platforms yanking the handles of established brands and registered trademarks, but is "sussexroyal" really as good an Instagram name as Harry and Meghan can come up with, and worth the negative pr of stories like this one?
Is this even that negative PR? They're probably going to get more people going "oooh Prince Harry and Meghan are on Instagram I should follow them" than being outraged and quitting
They is referring to the Prince and Meghan, correct? They have to know by now what happpened. They can give the name back. Or not use it at the very least. Otherwise why shouldn’t it fall on them? Not knowing beforehand isn’t an excuse to go along with it now.
This isn't uncommon. Twitter is another prime example. Their "rules" state that you cannot (since 2009) make a three letter handle in your username, and yet @AOC was able to acquire hers. I don't have any problem with this but it does bring up the fact that there seems to be certain people able to skirt the rules because of "who they are". What about famous people getting verified on Twitter when the verification program was supposedly halted? It goes on and on, but the fact of the matter is "money talks".
When the incentives align they will surely bend the rules. It's in Instagram's and Twitter's interest to have the royal family and high profile politicians, respectively, active, happy, and easy to find.
Meanwhile, I've been emailing Instagram yearly for many years now trying to gain control of an account that has had 1 post and 15 followers for YEARS now, that is squatting on an account name that is the same name as a registered LTD that I actually own and use. Crickets.
Twitter did the same thing to me a few years back. I registered @machinima back in 2006 or so and would semi frequently post links to interesting machinima videos I liked. After a couple of years I stopped posting for a while and I guess you could consider the account “inactive” even though my Twitter client was authenticated and checked it daily for activity via api (or so I thought). A few years ago I went to post something and found I couldn’t log in.
Never got an email about it or any form of contact. They just up and gave my account to the machinima.com company.
Have you tried getting it back now that machinima.com is defunct (albeit much like the original content that got them off the ground)? I think rooster teeth probably don't want to be associated with that brand anyway.
> "I thought 'What's that all about?' He said 'Look on Instagram' so I looked on Instagram and suddenly my handle wasn't @sussexroyal anymore it was @_sussexroyal_
They could have at least explained the situation to that person and allow them to choose a new handle. I would be furious if my handle suddenly had "_" as prefix and suffix. What next, "@xXxsussexroyalxXx"?
The daft thing is there are plenty of alternative names they could have taken, that are genuinely idle accounts, and arguably better names:
sussexroyals (there are two of them after all)
thesussexroyals (more grammatically correct)
thesussexes (as they are commonly referred to in the press)
harryandmeghan (has only posted once since Dec 2017)
meghanandharry (ladies first!)
I'd imagine the Prince's staff contacted Instagram to talk about having an account set up, and maybe suggested the name.
Instagram people were probably star struck, and salivating at the idea of _millions_ of eyeballs and media interest on the site, that they pretty much waived anything through.
I'd imagine a lot of the top brass at companies would do anything for a slice of celebrity/royal action, it's a gold mine and worth a lot more to them than some peon from Reading who just lurks.
In the 90s, Mr. Nissan was able to fight and keep nissan.com. That feels like a thousand years ago. Now everything is governed by private "policies" that amount to "we can do anything we want".
Hasn’t Mr, Nissan spent a ton of money fighting? It’s great that it was and is an option for domains sometimes. But 99% of the time, you’re not going to be able to fight anyway.
Not cool, but nothing new. Distrokid was blatant enough to brag about it in his newsletter in 2017. I sent a polite email voicing my concerns, but I never received more than the auto-reply.
Somewhat related, I find it unusual that a lot of SaaS companies get you to choose a subdomain during the trial signup process. Sometimes I just want to try out a service and kind of feel bad squatting on a somewhat premium subdomain so easily. I’m launching a product soon and it made me think about different ways to handle this, especially wrt to shorter (more premium), and trademark/brand related names.
Fuck royalty. The whole idea is stupid. Actually, as far as that goes, fuck "celebrity worship" in general, royal or otherwise. IMO, too many people spend too much time worrying about what some "famous" twit is doing.
You and me both can sit and here and wait and see if they break up and chew on their shared instagram name. I wish them the best but to me they are just another celebrity couple and any moment could stop enjoying each other.
It's well known that if you know people at Instagram you can highjack almost any handle. There is plenty of stories out there documenting the theft of prime handles like @firstname or 3 character handles.
I remember reading about this in their TOS years ago... I think they normally outline in under taking away names to give to rightful owners. (If you’re name is @apple for example ).
This seems like a poorly handled extension of that power.
But- truly just an example of how your use, data, name, etc on these services is really just at their whim.
The word apple has other meanings besides Apple, Inc, but it is a registered trademark in the USA. Since instagram is based in the USA, it's pretty clear that Apple, Inc is the rightful owner. Whether or not they should have a trademark on such a common word is a separate question.
It’s only a registered trademark for their business field. For example Apple Records also has a registered trademark on Apple in the USA. So by your measure they’re just as valid a rightful owner.
It's pretty obvious what the most well-known trademark is. I don't think Google would be giving ibm.dev to the International Brotherhood of Magicians [1]. Here's an example as it pertains to domain names [2]. Of course Instagram is different and there's much less oversight, but they would probably do something similar, where they first verify a trademark, and if multiple parties have the same word in the trademark, determine which.
"2.5 Does putting my trademark in the Clearinghouse mean that I automatically get my trademark as a domain name in all new gTLDs?
No. The Clearinghouse verifies and maintains information from many jurisdictions and classes of goods or services, and many parties may have legitimate rights in the same trademark. Allocation of domain names in a particular TLD occurs according to the registry policies for that TLD."
I didn't say that they would be infringing on Apple, Inc's trademark and I don't think that. I only think that in disputed ownership, based on instagram's purpose of providing a communication platform, the rightful owner would be Apple, Inc, not someone who happened to register it first. And they have a way of determining who the rightful owner, to them, is. Clearly the definition of rightful owner isn't universal, nor is it 100% consistently determined, but a process can be made for determining it. Here's an example: https://newgtlds.icann.org/en/about/trademark-clearinghouse/...
Do you think people don’t understand why Instagram is doing this? We know why a [powerful] entity would help another powerful entity. We’re not happy about it. Why would we be okay with the process of determining being of such sheer elitism?
No guilty party in this tale. But don't see how you can now use that name without having some social justice warrior somewhere foaming at the mouth with righteous indignation.
So I guess you don't have any ownership over a URL path component on somebody else's server when you're not even paying for that hosting. Not particularly surprising...
> Instagram confirmed to Newsbeat that Kevin's handle had been changed in line with its policy.
> It allows it to make changes to an account if it's been inactive for a certain amount of time.
I tried going to the guy's new Instagram [1], but couldn't see any posts there at all. I visited his Twitter [2] instead, and except for a few posts he made from the exciting run in the last 24 hours, he hadn't tweeted since 2013.
I don't think they did a bad thing here — it's their platform, and they have some incentive to encourage a more lively and current community. Although it seems minor, one facet of this might be to help big users reclaim better names from the huge pool of defunct ones out there, especially given that Instagram has gotten so big that finding anything that's not a conflict is difficult.
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[1] https://www.instagram.com/_sussexroyal_/
[2] https://twitter.com/Sussexroyal/