What? Me - worry? Er - Engaged in Adversarial Relationships?

I quote from Chin Wong’s Manila Times article:

The [PICS] draft paper also noted Disini’s “antagonistic and adversarial relationship with the Philippine Internet community.”

When people criticize me, I try to make it a point to listen to them and figure out where they are coming from. It was somewhat surprising for me to hear the PICS paper refer to me as having “antagonistic and adversarial relationship with the Philippine Internet community.”

Sure, I have had some antagonistic relationships with members of the Internet community, but as far as I can tell, this is probably the case with people who have attempted to take over control of the PH Domain. It shouldn’t be surprising that there would be some discord, given that

1) these people have failed to articulate any valid reason for taking over control of the PH Domain.
2) there has been little regard for the time and money we’ve invested in building up the DotPH brand and infrastructure. The people we’ve dealt with seemed to have no problems appropriating our investment without any sort of compensation. I felt that was unfair, so it’s only natural that things have gotten testy at times.

But have there been other people who feel I’ve been adversarial with? Perhaps! And I thought I’d like to clear the air on that.

I note that the head of PICS is Maan Tolentino, an AVP for BPI, whose company sued us over a year ago because a cybersquatter had been using the domain bpiexpressonline.com.ph. The suit was settled amicably, but I sometimes wonder if the PICS paper has something to do with the lawsuit.

Here is what happened. One day, Emil Avancena of DotPH received a call from Maan Tolentino requesting us to disconnect the bpiexpressonline.com.ph nameholder. Maan’s reasoning - which is how most “cybersquatees” feel - is that

1) we (Maan) are obviously the rightful owners of bpiexpressonline, and you (dotph) know it!
2) it would be a simple matter for Dotph to disconnect the current user and pass control of the domain to BPI.

What Maan failed to understand is

1) It is not our job a DotPh to determine who is the rightful owner of the bpiexpressonline.com.ph trademark. (It would turn out, during our court case, the BPI in fact DID NOT have the rights to the trademark. BPI had filed for the mark, but the trademark had yet to be approved!)

2) It was possible that the nameholder did in fact have the rights to the bpiexpressonline trademark in another country.

3) ICANN expressly discourages ccTLDs like DotPH from getting involved in these kinds of disputes and has set up a dispute resolution process to handle these kinds of issues. We actively encouraged BPI to contact WIPO, and told them that in our experience, WIPO normally settled these kinds of issues in less than sixty days. If BPI was indeed the rightful owner of the mark “bpiexpressonline”, it should have no problem getting WIPO to rule in its favor.

BPI was not pleased and preferred to sue us. Why? I’m not sure - but I think it’s something unique to Filipino culture. She (Maan) probably expected us to bend the rules for her, and was probably felt insulted when we would not do so. I recall JR Contreras - who was largely responsible for trying to take over control of Dotph four years ago, and with whom I used to enjoy excellent relations - being miffed that I refused to register the domain “powerup.com.ph” w/o prior payment. When people know you, they expect special treatment; and they are put off when you don’t accord them that. The flip side is that when I help people, they are overly grateful - and are a bit surprised when I tell them that it was nothing - I was simply doing my job.

Not too long ago, we had a Telco who was having a major problem with some of their domains. It turns out that the Registrar (for the domains) and the Telco had a financial dispute, and the Registrar was refusing to change the nameservers (of the domains) to point to the Telco’s. As a result, the nameholders were caught in the middle, and their email was bouncing. The nameholders were getting upset with the Telco (whom they had paid to register their domains).

In this case, it was not DotPH’s job to determine who owed whom. But the fix was elegantly simple - DotPH employs two domain locks - one so that the user can’t transfer from one Registrar to another. We implemented this lock so that Registrars had some protection against nameholders who still owed them money. So the fix was to teach the Registrar to enable the transfer lock (so they still had control over the domains) while allowing the domains’ nameservers to point to the Telco’s (so that mail would be properly processed). The Telco and Registrar could continue to work out their differences in court, while the Registrar could continue to exercise control over the domains, yet the Nameholder’s domain details could now be managed by the Telco (w/ the proper authorization from the nameholder)- to avoid any disruption in service.

The Telco was profuse in their thanks - thinking I had done them a special favor - but they didn’t realize I would have applied the rules equally for any Registrar.

We in the Philippines had a President who once said “walang kamag-anak dito”. Yet we don’t know what to make of people who actually practice this policy. I live in a neighborhood where security is strict and the guards call up the resident before allowing any guest in. People understand that this is done for security reasons, yet there always are people who are insulted when a guard subjects them to this kind of security check. “Hindi mo ba ako nakikilala? Sino ka ba?” etc. etc.

If the PICS people are listening, I think it would be good for them to document these “adversarial and antagonistic relationships”. It would be good for me and it would be good for the community.