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HMO sues charity over domain name

Douglas Carnall BMJ

A large Californian health maintenance organisation is suing a health charity because it wants its internet domain name.

HealthNet is owned by Foundation Health Systems and looks after 2.2 million Californians with a budget of $8.9bn (£5.6bn). In contrast, SatelLife, which owns the HealthNet.org domain name has an annual budget of just over $1m (£625 000). It helps health workers in 164 countries access health information using email and a cheap low orbit satellite connection (see /cgi/content/full/313/7072/1606).

HealthNet registered its name as a trademark in 1981, but did not register HealthNet.net and HealthNet.com as domain names until three years after SatelLife registered HealthNet.org in May 1993.

The charity is not keen to give way. "Changing the domain names would involve reprogramming machines in many remote developing world locations, as well as the satellite," said SatelLife director Holly Ladd.

"We estimate it would cost more than $1m to do, and create considerable confusion amongst our overseas users. There is little likelihood that users would confuse healthnet.org with healthnet.com. After all, they plan to spend $20m on their web presence alone next year."

The charity is also unhappy about the $7000 legal bill the action has already incurred, though its future costs are being met on a pro bono basis by a sympathetic legal firm. Until 1993, domain name registration was under the aegis of a single organisation, Network Solutions, who tightly maintained access to the coveted ".com" ".org" ".net" and ".edu" domains.

The process was fully privatised in 1998. The history of this process is described at www.networksolutions.com/internic/internic.html. The non-profit organisation that oversees the domain name registration companies is ICANN. Its policy on dispute resolution is at www.icann.org/udrp/udrp-policy-24oct99.htm