Companies Settle Over TLD Sales
from the give-back-the-money dept
It seems that the FTC has settled cases with some British companies accused of selling fake top level domains. The companies have agreed to give back the money people paid for domains that ended in things like .usa, because it wasn’t made clear that almost no one would be able to actually visit those domains. Of course, the more interesting part of this story is that the folks who were selling .usa are now appealing the settlement, saying they were tricked into it, and that the FTC changed the terms on them. However, it seems that they’ve got some documents with the guy’s signature on them, so it’s unclear how his “they changed it on me” claims will stand up. He’s also saying that he was offering a legitimate “alternative domain”. That, of course, may be true, but it certainly sounds like he was misleading in how it was marketed to people, since most of his customers probably had little to no idea that no one would ever be able to see their website.
