Yahoo has filed a complaint against Spanish blogger David Blanco Ramos for the bad faith registration of the Yahoo.tel domain name. The domain was registered during the launch of the .tel domain name, Yahoo being the first major company trying to acquire its domain back from third-party registrations.
Other major companies like Adobe, Apple or Google have managed to obtain the right to their .tel domain name before the initial launch. From October 23 2008 to February 2009, the .tel domain name was opened for registrations only for trademark holders for a 300-dollar registration fee.
It seems that Mr. Blanco got his hands on the domain only following that date, after
Yahoo! Inc. representatives miserably failed to register the domain. Even if there is a large chance for Yahoo to get it back through arbitration at the National Arbitration Forum, where it has recently filed a complaint, this will cost the company $1,500, plus some more legal fees.
The .tel domain name is not a regular domain name, being more of an online virtual business card. Currently, all .tel information is stored on Telnic's DNS servers, Telnic being the owner of the .tel TLD name. Companies can list their information in a standard format, all pages being generated on the fly with information obtained from the DNS server.
A .tel DNS query won't return an IP address where the data can be found, but will actually return the entire webpage. This is possible thanks to the NAPTR feature in DNS servers.
.tel domain names are different from .mobi domains, as .tel will only display contact data, while .mobi domain will hold a webpage specially formatted to be displayed on mobile devices.
All .tel pages look alike, just showing personal information about the domain's owner. For example, the
softpedia.tel page will just display contact information (email and webpage), a Google Maps location field, some search keywords and the option to download a vCard signature file.
For now, the yahoo.tel page includes a link to the Mr. Blanco's personal blog.
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