The National Arbitration Forum Blog

Recently, Twitter and Facebook have created ways for their users to create their own distinct Web addresses and avoid being cybersquatted. For Twitter these are called "Verified Accounts" and on Facebook these are called "usernames".

On Twitter, the account verification "experiment" began in response to Tony La Russa's cybersquatting claims against the site. La Russa, the manager of the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team, complained about someone impersonating him on the site in a May lawsuit. The experiment starts with "public officials, public agencies, famous artists, athletes, and other well known individuals at risk of impersonation".

In response, the unrelated but somewhat similar social media website Facebook gave users the opportunity to choose personalized usernames. While these were offered on a first-come, first-serve basis, Facebook did allow trademark holders to fill out forms protecting their marks saying it would internally mediate all disputes. According to the New York Times Blog, one ICANN representative, Tim Cole, speculates that this might not be enough: "This sounds like the early days when Network Solutions started doing domain registrations, and they didn’t anticipate the nature of the trademark issues that started arising and weren’t prepared for the flurry of lawsuits they started receiving," Mr. Cole said.

While there is no dispute resolution process set up through the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) for Facebook or Twitter URL disputes, there are arbitration policies for internet domain names. The National Arbitration Forum administers arbitrations under several ICANN policies, including that of the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) that governs disputes over domain names with extensions such as .com and .org.