The Mishpat-Update #8


Welcome to the eighth issue of the weekly Mishpat-Update, Law on

the net from http://mishpat.net



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In this issue:



1. What's New

2. Domain Name registration competition

3. Award winner review

4. Cyberlaw News



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1. What's New

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I would like to welcome the 5 new subscribers who joined the list this

week. 



The Mishpat Update archive (updates 1-5) can be found at

http://mishpat.net/mailing-lists/update



No new resources added this week.

Next week I'll update the archives and add a special surprise for the

Mishpat-Update readers - details in the next issue.



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2. Domain Name registration competition

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The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) named

the five companies that will participate in the initial test phase of

the new competitive shared registry system for .com, .net and .org

domains ending Network Solutions Inc.'s (NSI) monopoly. 



As explained in Mishpat-Update #4, ICANN is a new global non-profit

corporation formed to oversee a set of the Internet's core technical

management functions, including coordinating the assignment of protocol

parameters, the management of the domain name system and root server

systems, and the allocation of IP address space. The growing size and

international importance of the Internet has necessitated the creation

of a technical management body that is both more formalized in

structure and more fully reflective of the geographic diversity of the

Internet community. 



Under a contract awarded in 1993 by the American National Science

Foundation, NSI has held the exclusive right to register domain names

ending in ".com," ".net," and ".org." These endings grace an estimated

50 percent to 70 percent of the world's roughly 5 million addresses,

and sales of domain names were responsible for the bulk of NSI's 

million in revenues last year.

Under the Cooperative Agreement between NSI and the U.S. Government,

the competitive registrar testbed program will begin on April 26 and

will last until June 24, 1999 (Phase I). Following the conclusion of

Phase I, the Shared Registry System for the .com, .net, and .org

domains will be opened on equal terms to all accredited registrars,

meaning that any company that meets ICANN's standards for accreditation

will be able to enter the market as a registrar and offer customers

competitive domain name registration services in the .com, .net, and

.org domains. 



ICANN selected the first five participants based on their technical

capability, business experience, and geographic reach. The five

selected companies are:



America Online - America Online, Inc. operates: two worldwide Internet

services, America Online, with more than 17 million members, and

CompuServe, with approximately 2 million members; several leading

Internet brands including ICQ; the Netscape Netcenter and aol.com

portals; and the Netscape Navigator and Communicator browsers. 



CORE (Internet Council of Registrars) - a not for profit international

membership association of Internet domain name registrars. CORE's

membership spans 23 countries and reflects a wide array of domain names

related activities, including ISPs, telecommunications carriers,

country code TLD registries, research foundations and specialized small

businesses. 



France Telecom/ Oleane - one of the world's leading telecommunications

carriers with operations in more than 50 countries. In addition to

Internet services, France Telecom provides businesses and consumers

with a full range of services, including local, long distance and

international telephony, as well as data, wireless, cable-TV and value

added services. 



Melbourne IT - an Australian IT company that provides high performance

e-commerce services is the largest country code based commercial

domain name administrator in the Asia-Pacific region. 



Register.com - a division of Forman Interactive Corp., a leading

provider of Internet based solutions for small- and medium sized

businesses. 



During the test, the five registrars will be given direct access to the

domain registry operated by NSI. The testbed is designed to solve all

technical glitches before additional registrars are added. The testbed

companies will be able to actually register domains for their

customers. During the test, registrars will also have to pay a  fee.



Besides the five testbed participants, ICANN also said 29 other

companies (including AT&T) have met its accreditation criteria and are

expected to be named registrars once the testing is complete (the first

phase is planned to last until June 24,1999). A full list of the

companies to be accredited as Post Testbed Registrars can be found at

http://www.icann.org/REGIS.html



Though adding the new companies under a shared system is designed to

end NSI's monopoly, critics of the plan say it will fail to put the new

competitors on equal footing with the incumbent. Under the new

arrangement, NSI will continue to maintain the database that its new

competitors must access in order to provide domain names. NSI also will

receive a fee for every domain name its competitors register (9

year) and will charge them for the software they must use to access the

database (,000). The critics say that as long as it controls the

Net's master database of domain names, also known as the registry, NSI

will maintain the upper hand. They point out that it doesn't make any

sense to have one of the competitors in charge of the registry.





ICANN's press release

http://www.icann.org/icann-pr21apr99.htm



Internet Council of Registrars (CORE) press release

http://www.corenic.org/press_releases/1999-04-21-testbed.htm



Register.com press release

http://www.register.com/pressrelease.cgi?1|18594641



France Telecom press release

http://www.oleane.com/english/press/communique19.htm



NSI Registry

http://www.nsiregistry.com/







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3. Award winner review

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This section is devoted to sites that won the Mishpat Award for legal

sites. To apply for the award or view the winning sites, visit

http://mishpat.net/awards



Site Name:

Der virtuelle Rechtsvergleicher 



URL:

http://viadrina.euv-frankfurt-o.de/~dvr/



Description:

The "virtuelle Rechtsvergleicher" is a collection of about 1300 legal

links. It aims to help work in the field of comparative private law.



Site review:

The "virtulle Rechtsvergleicher" (VR) from the European University

Viadrina is an excellent collection of international law legal links.

The links cover 23 countries including the US, EU, other european

countries and Israel. In addition there are many links to International

law sites such as the international supreme court, EU resources,

comparative law and more. The links for each country are further

divided into 12 different categories (government, lawyers, libraries

etc.).



Unfortunately VR is currently only available in the German version. It

may also be accessed in English, French and Polish but the problem is

that the category links in each of the country pages are listed in

german only (an English visitor has to learn the uniform scheme [listed

in the English page] by which all the fields are covered). 



Most the links pages are in English, so if you need to locate

information from one of the listed countries or find international law

resources, VR is definitely a starting point to consider.



http://viadrina.euv-frankfurt-o.de/~dvr/



To apply for the Mishpat Award or view the winning sites, visit

http://mishpat.net/awards





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4. Cyberlaw Updates

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Each week Mishpat-Update brings you the latest news about

online and computer law, with links to the full reports available

on the web.





* Citibank trademark domain lawsuit *

Citigroup, the international financial services firm filed a lawsuit

against Internet Entertainment Group (IEG), which designs and sells

advertising space on pornographic sites. Citigroup claims that IEG has

been wrongfully using its Citibank trademarked name by using the web

address wwwcitibank.com (without a period after the three w's) to

direct users to X-rated advertisements. Citibank's site is located at

www.citibank.com. If Citibank customers mistakenly omit the period

after the three w's, they will be directed to the IEG's pornographic

site Clubanytime.com.

http://www.news.com/News/Item/0%2C4%2C35370%2C00.html?dd.ne.txt.0420.21





* Australian Holocaust denier arrested in Germany *

While Israel commemorated Holocaust Memorial Day last week,

Australian controversial historian Frederick Toben was charged in

Germany under a law which prohibits defaming the memory of the dead.

Toben is chairman of the Adelaide Institute, an organization whose Web

site claims the Nazi death camps for Jews are not historically

provable. The interesting legal question is Toben's liability in

Germany for Web site information legally posted on an Australian Web

server .

http://www.idg.net/go.cgi?id=112259





* Smut e-mail law doesn't violate free speech rights *

The US Supreme Court upheld without explanation a federal court in

California ruling, that a federal law aimed at keeping some smut out of

e-mails violates no free speech rights. At issue was a provision in the

Communications Decency Act of 1996 making it a crime to transmit a

"communication which is obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy or indecent

with intent to annoy, abuse, threat or harass another person."  

That provision was attacked by ApolloMedia Corp., that developed the

"annoy.com" Web site to let people anonymously communicate their

opinions to politicians, news figures and other public officials by

using language that some might consider indecent. The court upheld the

challenged provision by interpreting it to apply only to obscene

material, which gets no protection from the Constitution's First

Amendment. 

The Annoy site can be found at http://www.annoy.com/

Full story:

http://www.cnn.com/US/9904/19/scotus.decency.ap/

http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/tech/cte915.htm





* Nuclear labs restart computers *

The three nuclear weapons labs that were shut down because of computer

security concerns (as reported in Mishpat Update #7), have begun

restarting their classified computers after a two week halt. Scrutiny

of the labs' computers increased in the wake of spying concerns. A Los

Alamos National Laboratory employee, Taiwan born Wen Ho Lee, was fired

last month for violating the lab's security policies and for

failing a lie detector test on questions about releasing U.S.

nuclear weapons information to China. Lee hasn't been charged with a

crime, and China has denied the allegations. 

http://www.news.com/News/Item/0%2C4%2C35305%2C00.html?dd.ne.txt.0419.10





* British ISP sues spammer *

Virgin Net is the first British ISP (Internet Service Provider) to sue

a spammer. Virgin sued Adrian Paris after he used four different Virgin

accounts to send out more than 250,000 spam emails (junk email

messages). 

http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2244949,00.html





* Small businesses privacy issues *

Many small businesses rush to join the global electronic market and

sell online, but lack the technical expertise needed to protect their

customers' private information such as names and credit card numbers. 

http://www.news.com/News/Item/0%2C4%2C35451%2C00.html?dd.ne.txt.0421.12



If you know of any cyberlaw updates, please send them to

mailto:news@mishpat.net



That's all for this time,

see you next week



Yedidya M. Melchior 

Editor
The Cyberlaw Informer
Back to Mishpat-Update archive