Naming and Shaming in the Name Game

Naming and Shaming in the Name Game

There seems to be two core areas where domain owners have a lot of frustration with bad behavior by outside parties.

The first one is Reverse Domain Name Hijacking, Rick Schwartz has led the charge on this topic and Rick has resorted to naming and shaming those that have in his opinion, tried to steal his property. Rick actually wrote a piece yesterday discussing his tactics. Rick wrote that he does not care for those in the domaining community that don’t like his tactics, Rick said, “You protect your assets and family the way you see fit and I’ll do the
same. Except I live in the world of reality and in reality there are
still corporate bullies roaming around taking things they are not
entitled to legally or morally.”

Rick certainly has brought to light other companies that have tried to RDNH names that belonged to other domainers.

Michael Berkens from thedomains wrote a piece last week about a udrp decision on RT.org that many felt should have resulted in a RDNH. There was a comment by Domainer Extraordinaire, “

Anyone willing to try to steal a domain name is not deterred by the
possibility being found guilty of RDNH especially since there is no
consequence.

As long as domain names are worth stealing, people will continue to use this system to try and steal them.” I kind of felt that he was spot on with this comment, and asks the question does naming and shaming companies that try to RDNH ? I think answers will be all over the board on that one.

To be fair the domain community can take no other action in this example, RT.org was not lost in UDRP but many including Michael Berkens thought the company should have been ruled to have attempted RDNH. Rick also has a site up at RDNH.com to help shed more light on the topic.

The second area of frustration we will discuss in this article is deadbeat buyers. Just about anyone who has transacted business on Sedo or Afternic has had to put up with them. There was a recent case where one domainer could not take it anymore. He posted a thread on Namepros and he named and shamed the buyer and his business.

In a domainer centric forum you would have thought the response would be overwhelming for the seller, it was not. There were people who said they would never do business with the seller, that it was wrong to name and shame, that people can change their mind, one poster noted that many states have 3-day cancellation clause requirements for contracts,
for example, allowing a buyer 3 days to change their mind after signing a
contract.

The buyer actually joined Namepros himself and referred to Sedo as harassing him with two to three emails a day. The seller has obviously been frustrated by the response. If there is no remedy by Sedo which one cannot expect as they are just the middleman, what is there to do about deadbeat buyers especially in the minds of those who believe naming and shaming is wrong ?

Naming and Shaming goes far beyond domaining and is used in many other industries where people feel they have no other way for a fair result. Sometimes people jump straight to it when others feel they could have handled it differently.

Scientific American just ran an article last week that was inspired by the recent naming and shaming done at a tech conference. The short story of that is that a female attendee who was tired of hearing what she deemed sexist jokes, stood up, turned around and took a picture of the gentlemen talking and tweeted it to her 9000 followers. The story got a lot of buzz and supposedly the gentlemen were fired by their company. You can read that story here.

If you do read the story pay attention to the comments where the support is overwhelmingly for those named and shamed.

Back to the Scientific American article, Janet Stemwedel dives deep into the ethics of Naming and Shaming. From the article :

There’s not a simple algorithm or litmus test that will tell you when
shaming bad actors is the best course of action, but there are
questions that are worth asking when assessing the options:

• What are the potential consequences if this piece of bad behavior,
  which is observable to at least some members of the community, goes unchallenged?
• What are the potential consequences if this piece of bad behavior,
  which is observable to at least some members of the community, gets challenged privately?
  (In particular, what are the potential consequences to the person
  engaging in the bad behavior? To the person challenging the behavior?
  To others who have had occasion to observe the behavior, or who might be
  affected by similar behavior in the future?)
• What are the potential consequences if this piece of bad behavior,
  which is observable to at least some members of the community, gets challenged publicly?
  (In particular, what are the potential consequences to the person
  engaging in the bad behavior? To the person challenging the behavior?
  To others who have had occasion to observe the behavior, or who might be
  affected by similar behavior in the future?)

Challenging bad behavior is not without costs. Depending on your status within the community, challenging a bad actor may harm you more than the bad actor. However, not challenging bad behavior has costs, too. If the community and its members aren’t prepared to deal with bad behavior when it happens, the community has to bear those costs.

That last part resonates with me in the seller on Namepros case, I mean this with no disrespect to the seller but he is not held in the same esteem as Rick Schwartz is in domaining. Is it his status in domaining that brought about more people not liking his technique ? If it were Rick or Michael Berkens naming the deadbeat buyer would more people have responded favorably ?

So what is your opinion on Naming and Shaming ? Leave a comment.