In this case study video, I explain how internationalized domain names (IDNs) are treated under the first element of the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP).
The UDRP case I discuss involved the domain name <lnstagrám.com>, which at first glance looks a lot like the INSTAGRAM trademark. But upon closer examination, you can see that it differs from the INSTAGRAM trademark in two important ways:
First, the disputed domain name in this case replaced the letter “i” at the beginning of the domain name with the letter “l” instead, which is visually very similar, especially in the lowercase form of those letters, which is how domain names usually appear in browser windows or email addresses.
And the second difference — the one I focus on in the video — is that the disputed domain name replaced the first letter “a” with an accented version of the letter “a” instead.
IDNs, according to ICANN, “are domain names represented by characters other than the traditional ASCII characters (a through z)” and “could contain letters or characters from non-Latin scripts (for example, Arabic or Chinese).”
The motivation behind the use of IDNs makes perfect sense: Native English speakers are certainly not the only people who use the Internet, so why should domain names be limited to English language characters? As an English speaker and as an American, I may not have a need to access other characters – which don’t even appear on my keyboard – but I can certainly appreciate that people in other countries use them every day, so why should they not be available in domain names, too?
But, as this case shows, cybersquatters sometimes use IDNs to their advantage.
In the <lnstagrám.com> case, the UDRP panel wrote:
Prior UDRP panels have found IDNs and their Punycode translations to be equivalent…. [T]he Domain Name is confusingly similar to the INSTAGRAM Mark since it wholly incorporates the INSTAGRAM Mark, other than replacing the ‘I’ with a ‘l’ and the second ‘a’ with a ‘á’ which creates a minor distinction that would be easy for an Internet user to overlook. Consequently, the requirement of paragraph 4(a)(i) of the Policy is satisfied.
As this decision shows, cybersquatters can use IDNs to create even more opportunities for themselves to deceive Internet users by abusing trademarks. But the good news is that the UDRP process has proven to be a very effective way for trademark owners to deal with this issue, as UDRP panels routinely order the transfer of domain names in similar cases.
