It's MY .Name .Dammit

So a couple of years ago, after I had just had it redesigned, my RickTumlinson.com website went away. I found out that GoDaddy had been sending me notices, but they had gone into my spam box. I tried to get it back, but GoDaddy told me the people who took it wanted $500 dollars.

This was insulting in two ways:

They wanted $500 to blackmail me to get my own name back! And (almost worse) I was only worth $500!

At the time I had other things to do and dropped it...went with .net instead.

Recently, I decided to write a book, and need to have my .com back. Turns out they have made my name site an HIV or social disease website. (My Japanese is not so good. But I can spot an infectious disease, and that is what is on my landing page now.)

Exciting.

At 5 am one morning a little while back I woke with an idea...I looked up the WHOIS for the people who now owned my name. This is provided by ICANN.org, the group that monitors who owns what domain names. I found my site had been taken by a company called Onamae in Japan.

I went to the Onamae.com site. They seem to be a domain seller. It was in Japanese and the only English was this little logo in the corner. "GMO". I clicked on it and arrived at GMO Internet Group's website. They seem to be a major company, and there on the landing page was their CEO, Mr. Masatoshi Kumagai, a nice looking fellow who is obviously proud of what he has accomplished. He probably has no idea that his little subsidiary is wandering around grabbing people's unattended name sites and holding them for ransom...or perhaps he does, heck, it might be how he funded his empire...and why he is smiling.

So I went to GoDaddy and looked up his .com. It was available. He hadn't bought it.

So I did.

I also looked up some of his Board Members. They didn't own their names either.

So I now I do.

Here they are:

masatoshikumagai.com

masatoshikumagai.net

masatoshikumagai.org

masashiyasuda.com

hiroyoukinishiyama.com

isseiainoura.com

katsumiarisawa.com

toshiakihoriuchi.com

tadashiito.com

I am now deciding what to do next. Frankly, I would just like to have my name back. I did leave them a note on their corporate "Contact Us" page mentioning I was thinking of using their CEOs name as a public service site for STDs as well, or maybe I'll go for a site promoting hygiene...hmnnn.

While I see no issue with grabbing cool domain names, even possible company names, a person's name should be theirs. My name IS my brand. I write under it, speak under it, do my space policy work and am building my new venture capital company partially using my name and the recognition it gives me after 35 years in my field. To me hoarding people's name sites it is like finding someone's wallet and ID and offering to sell it back to them. I know courts have weighed in on this and found it is legal except where there are trademarks etc. involved, but sometimes courts aren't the last word. In this case, while what Onamae and GMO have done is legal, so is my action...and perhaps there is a social sanction I can effect here... And while in the end I may still end up having to buy my name, for some Don Quixote-like reason it feels good to have found this tiny way to fight back, even if it doesn't work. (This story is not over though...we shall see what happens...)

A few things to end with. If you happen to know Mr. Kumagai, do tell him to drop me a note. If you haven't registered your own .com name, you might want to do that right now. And frankly, if someone does to you what Mr. Kumagai's company did to me, you might just want to look up the important folks in their life...