Do you remember when Facebook used to be thefacebook.com? Yeah, me neither. That was all the way back in 2005, before the company purchased the Facebook.com domain for $200,000. Now Facebook controls practically every Facebook domain from nearly every country.
However, we didn’t know until now that Facebook didn’t own Facebook.ir – the top level domain for Iranian websites.
With the company launching a Persian version of Facebook soon after the Iran election crisis erupted, it only makes sense that they should own Facebook.ir, right? However, a man by Majid Karimian of Yazd, Iran owned it until recently, when the United Nations told him to give up the domain to the social networking giant. Yes, the UN.
Karimian, who claims that he wanted to use Facebook.ir to sell books, lost a claim with the U.N.’s World Intellectual Property Organization. The U.N. agency ruled that Ghannad had no claim to the name and transferred ownership to Facebook.
We’re a bit surprised that the United Nations actually has the authority to do something like this, but it seems like the right decision. There’s really no claim you can make that justifies owning a Facebook domain. Unless, of course, your name is actually Facebook, in which case we feel sorry for you.
Still, Facebook’s new Iranian domain is useless as long as Iran continues to block the site in the name of censorship.
