Do Facebook and Twitter need a UDRP?

As reported by Tech:Blorge today, German pharmaceutical giant Merck is suing Facebook in a New York Court (reported by WSJ) to demand details as to why Facebook will not allow them to use the “facebook.com/merck” username for their Facebook page.

According to Tech:Blorge, “The German firm came first, while the US firm was created using American assets surrendered by the German firm during the first world war. To minimize confusion and to avoid trademark disputes, the German firm is known as EMD Chemicals in North America, while the US firm is known as Merck Sharp & Dohme outside of North America.”

The German company says it cut a deal with Facebook last year allowing them exclusive rights to the address but has failed to follow through (BBC).

What do you think, do we need UDRP-like rules for social media URLs?

[via Tech:Blorge]

Until ICANN releases One Letter TLDs (no plans have been announced so far), .TO has now introduced the world’s shortest URL shortener in partnership with eCorporation.com. Unfortunately the new service comes with some problems:

When you try to access the service from your webbrowser, you can however not just enter “to” in your browser’s address bar, as that will trigger a search in most of today’s browsers. So you will have to enter “www.to” instead. So the site will also append the “www.” in front of the shortened URL and thus actually negate their advantage of having the shortest URL – however without doing so, the generated addresses would most likely not pass the validation for a valid link used on most sites. The only alternative option is to write the addresses like this “http://to./d6Goe“, which most webbrowsers will then again correctly identify as a domain.

[via YCombinator News]