A woman from Oregon has sued ICANN over a number of expired domain names, after she claims that they did not do a good enough job reallocating the domains after the registrar she was with became insolvent.

Denise Subramaniam filed the lawsuit back in March over her domains, which she had registered for a number of different clients. Following the bankruptcy of her then-registrar a number of these expired before they were correctly transferred over to a new registrar, where she could renew them herself.

The lawsuit explains that the Plaintiff’s business is now much more likely to suffer following the failure of ICANN, and the damages include loss of credibility, lost SEO positioning and lost visitor activity which may have ultimately been converted to sales. ICANN supposedly contacted her on the 21st September 2010 letting her know that the registrar was in fact bankrupt, but giving no instructions on how to recover her already expired domains, or prevent more domains from expiring. It is also states in the extensive lawsuit that the transfer to the chosen new registrar was not done correctly, and this was not rectified in time before more of the Plaintiffs domains expired, the chosen registrar did not then offer her the phone support she was expecting. She has since established a new reseller account with a different ICANN accredited registrar that better suits her needs however.

By way of justification to sue the lawsuit states that ICANN has “significant presence in, and connection with Oregon, every Oregon government office, Oregon business, Oregon non-profit… [ and every] Oregon citizen with a website ultimately bought their domain name from ICANN”.

In relation to the law suit ICANN have commented saying the following:

“Plaintiff sued the wrong party, in the wrong jurisdiction, and under the wrong statutes because Oregon lacks personal jurisdiction over ICANN and ICANN has no connection to Plaintiff’s alleged injuries.”

The lawsuit also named the owner of the now-bankrupt registrar. The trustee of the bankrupt party was then forced to file a notice of removal directly with the Bankuptcy Court in Florida. This then meant that ICANN had to begin the arduous task of filing a 20 page rationale for why the removal to bankruptcy court was incorrect!

The case continues…

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