The owner of France.com c 1994 sued the French government for the confiscation of the domain

On March 12, 2018, France.com suddenly went offline. For 24 years he worked as a tourist showcase for a commercial travel agency and allowed to book tickets for travels in France. Owner Jean-Noel Friedman, an American citizen, registered him in 1994, a few years after domain registration became generally accessible. Since then, he has had a fairly profitable business. To protect the asset, he even registered the corresponding trademark. France.com Inc. officially registered in California.

But everything changed on March 12, 2018, when the American company Web.com “suddenly transferred ownership of the domain to the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The company did this without any formal notification from Friedman and without compensation. ” Just one day the site stopped working, and emails were not delivered to the address.

At the moment, france.com redirects visitors to france.fr , which is owned by the French Foreign Ministry. The former domain owner himself regards this as an illegal seizure of property, especially since the .com domain was located in the international commercial domain zone, which is not related to French jurisdiction. Jean-Noel Friedman intends to restore justice - and is now suing the French government and several hosting providers, hoping to return the business.

For almost a quarter of a century of its existence, the site has undergone several incarnations. For a while, he worked as a site with news about France, including for paid subscribers, but then he finally decided on self-identification as a travel agency: he worked like that for many years . With an audience of about 100 thousand people per month, the site brought in income on commission deductions. What is characteristic, to Fridman and his project never had any complaints. The French Tourism Bureau collaborated with him, and in 2009 even awarded the award “Best Website”. But it seems that in 2016, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs changed its mind. Even without putting forward commercial offers to buy a domain from the owner, it immediately sued - and in July 2016, the Supreme Court of Paris ordered Friedman to transfer the domain into the ownership of the French government under the threat of a fine.
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The decision was upheld by the Court of Appeal in September 2017 , and now it is being appealed in the Supreme Court of France.

Friedman assumed that, until the end of the court proceedings, he would retain control of the domain, even with the payment of a fine, as the court of first instance decided. However, at some point the French authorities sent a direct order to the registrar Web.com - and that was enough. The registrar obediently transferred the domain to the new owner. To make matters worse, registration was transferred from the American registrator Web.com to the French OVH, which would rather carry out the decisions of the French, rather than the American courts.

There is a certain irony in the fact that this operation was turned by a company called Web.com, because it does not own the web. Maybe Sir Tim Berners-Lee (WWW inventor) can help do the same with her?

This is not the first time that a large corporation tries to select a domain registered to an individual. A famous precedent is the domain milka.fr in the case of Milka v Kraft Foods . A woman named Milka registered the milka.fr domain and used it for some time for her business before Kraft Foods Corporation noticed this and filed a lawsuit. The court sided with big business. Another precedent is the domain nissan.com . The Japanese auto giant Nissan Motor tried to take away the nissan.com domain registered in 1994 from Uzi Nissan, the founder and owner of Nissan Computer Corp., and demanded payment of $ 10 million in compensation, but in this case the big business lost .

But that the state authorities seized the domain from a private owner in the .com zone - this, it seems, did not happen at all. Domains USA.com, Canada.com and Germany.com belong to individuals, the domain Russia.com is the same travel site as France.com was and is owned by Russia.com Inc., registered in the UK .