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.
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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_Motors_vs._Nissan_Compu...