who currently handles domain name disputes?

[JPinMaryland]

Does anyone have any idea of what authority to go to in the case of domain name disputes? This one involves two parties both in the U.S. About ten years ago one of the clients went through the Internet Dispute Resolution Forum or some such. But from reading webmaster world I get the feeling that ICANN or some such authority is now handling such disputes. Does anyone know what authority to go to? Again both parties are US based.

[serp]

ICANN is the authority on it as long as it is one of their TLD's (.com, .org, .net, bunch of others) but they usually send it through a 3rd party provider to dispute it if you go through them.

http://www.icann.org/en/dndr/udrp/approved-providers.htm

In the US, however, the domain is often treated as a company asset/property and it's sent through the courts through lawsuits.

What exactly is the dispute over?

[JPinMaryland]

Yes, a google search confirms what you said. As both parties are US based as well as the registrar there are several arbitration entities under the umbrella of NAF, as I recall from a few days ago.

As for details, about ten years ago I represented a client in one of these disputes which we won, got the domain as well as a TM on the same name.

Ten years go by and the clients let both the TM lapse as well as the domain name as they werent making much (any?) money on it. Now a big company has come in and seems to be spending a lot of money on promotion of the name, they are using a modified version of the domain name (added a couple words)...

The original domain name, the basic name.com is being "parked" by some guy who hasnt done anything with it. A few phone calls have elicited no response so I guess we will start the dispute soon...

My guess is that our rights are definitely superior to the guy parking or holding the mark. In fact our rights are also likely superior to the new guys in town who seem to be spending a lot of money but have not made a move on the old, original, .com name.

I have a question is there a way to use google adsense to find out about how much traffic a search for companyname.com is doing? I think there is...

tx

[serp]

You are looking for Analytics instead of Adsense.

[JPinMaryland]

Okay so the adwords thingie (interface on the adwords site) allows you to type in a word and a price and it estimtes how many hits you will get. this is not an indicator of the number of searches that people are doing for that word? It just indicates click throughs?

[JPinMaryland]

clarification: Is the analytics site only good for tracking hits on your own website? Right now my clients dont have a website up and running. I would like to see how many web surfers out there are either a) hitting the site of the competitor, and/or b) how many are entering keywords that relate to this site,really a brand name that is part of their domain name...Is analytics the tool to measure this? It seems like adwords is..