Posted 12/30/09 at 12:54:49 PM by Paul Lilly

Going up against Google over a domain name dispute is like facing the Boston Celtics in the NBA championship. In other words, there's a good chance you're going to lose. Out of the 65 domain name disputes Google has filed to date, it has only lost twice, the most recent coming today.

The latest dispute involved Groovle.com, which Google claims is "confusingly similar" to its own trademark. The was was brought forward to the National Arbitration Forum, an international arbitration service accredited by ICANN and trusted to provide resolution services for domain name disputes around the globe. Only this time, Google's track record for winning these sort of disputes provided false hope for the search giant.

"We were stunned when Google launched the domain name dispute as we have great respect for Google and have always had a good relationship with them," said Ryan Fitzgibbon, one of the two Canadian co-founders of Groovle.com. Jacob Fuller, the other co-founder, added that "Google never had anything to fear from our web site. The arbitrators' decision that the two domain names are sufficiently different should put Google at ease and we look forward to a renewed positive relationship with Google."

We imagine Google is probably stunned too, because not one of the three person panel ruled in the search giant's favor.

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Posted 11/16/09 at 11:04:58 AM by Paul Lilly

Egypt is making a bit of history by being the first country to launch an Internet domain name using the Aribc script. The announcement comes not long after the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) decided to allow non-Latin top level domains.

Casting a cloud over Egypt's run towards the record books, Reporters Sans Frontieres, which campaigns for freedom of press, had some harsh words for the Egyptian government as it relates to Internet censorship.

"Egypt is one of the enemies of the Internet and if Internet governance requires a degree of regulation, it should be of a liberal nature and not the kind that the Egyptian government would like to impose," Reporters wrote.

The group went on to say that Egyptian police recently arrested and beat two young bloggers, Mohamed Adel, 20, and Amr Osama, 19, along with their lawyer, Amr Ezz, for "spreading false news and rumors liable to disturb the peace."

About 15 million of Eypt's 80 million residents are Internet users. And according to Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, even though there are over 300 million Arabic speakers worldwide, fewer than one percent of online content is in Arabic.

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