What’s In A (User) Name? Facebook’s contribution to online dispute creation
by Chris Peterson and Ethan Katsh
Generating a dispute online takes little effort. Any environment in which there is a great deal of activity, large numbers of transactions and many new and novel kinds of relationships will never be a completely harmonious environment. Some conflict is inevitable.
Creating large numbers of disputes overnight, on the other hand, takes some effort. We shall see in the next few weeks whether Facebook has given us a lesson in how to generate large numbers of disputes and whether a new initiative will create enough negative publicity that it might be forced to reconsider.
Facebook has approximately 200 million registered users. Each user has a profile (or, if the “user” is a corporate person, brand, or business, a “page”). Profiles function much like homepages once did: users create their digital identities by posting personal information, such as musical interests, contact information, pictures, and video. Additionally, profiles are interactive, such that users converse through comments posted to each other’s profiles.
Unlike traditional homepages, however, Facebook’s original purpose was to help likeminded students to meet each other, not to help them craft and present a public face to the world. Since Facebook was navigated through links and not URLs, its designers focused on function rather than form, and so a Facebook profile’s URL might look like http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1326450026&ref=ts
This isn’t something that is easy to put on a business card or use in other ways that might be convenient. No one self-identifies as a long string of numbers. So Facebook, in an attempt to
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further entrench itself as the social hub for digital natives, is allowing users to pick a username name for their page. Now, instead of a bunch of numbers, Joe Smith’s profile might be accessed at http://facebook.com/joesmith sFacebook accomplished this by simply letting users “claim” usernames on a first-come, first-served basis.The name grab began at 12:01 AM on June13, 2009.
For anyone interested in both the generation of disputes and their resolution, we have an interesting case study. There is added functionality and therefore some value to the new system and there should be, and already is, demand for names. On the other hand, Facebook is creating a scarce resource since only one person will get a URL with a particular name. Once http://facebook.com/joesmith is taken, no one else can get it.
Of course, this problem isn’t new to social network sites. For years, mySpace has had a similar system, and no one got too miffed if they had to settle for “skaterboy15” rather than the unadulterated purity of “skaterboy.” However, Facebook prides itself on its “real-name culture”, and avowedly aspires to represent their “real self” to the world. Moreover, as more and more celebrities and businesses (i.e. those who might have interests in their names) create Facebook presences, the tension between scarcity and value becomes only more intense.
What will be the effect of a system that creates scarcity and value at the same time? An economically or entrepreneurially minded Facebook might simply create a market in which those who obtained a certain name could sell it to those who came too late to get it. The more demand, the higher the price, and Facebook gets a cut. But at the moment at least, Facebook is not allowing anyone to sell or even change a name. Thus there will be no market to take care of the scarcity problem and those who REALLY want a particular name will have to use other means to try to obtain the name, namely some form of dispute resolution.
This brings to mind the fight over domain names. ICANN, in 1998, at least envisioned a fight over domain names as the system of first come-first served registration of domain names was put into effect. Thus was born ICANN’s Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy, a process that has handled more than 20,000 disputes in the last ten years. All these claims were filed by trademark owners who felt that a domain name infringed on their trademark. This is not the place to go over the charges of bias or unfairness in the UDRP but at least the system has been efficient. And at least it exists.
Facebook has 500 fan pages devoted to Julia Roberts. Now, a single page has the address of www.facebook.com/juliaroberts Will Ms. Roberts care about this and will this kind of use trouble Ms. Roberts to sue? She pursued and won a UDRP claim but Facebook has no process similar to the UDRP. Moreover, there is significantly less scarcity in domain names than on Facebook. For instance, ICANN offered users at least three top level domains (.com, .net. and .org) to choose from, so losers in one domain had alternatives in another. Furthermore, businesses have quite a bit of flexibility with their web addresses, and new startups often change their names to secure available domains. This is (one hopes) not true for individuals.
It is quite possible that all the trademark owners who claimed that all the cybersquatters who were infringing their trademarks by registering domain names will not care about the Facebook names. It is also possible that cybersquatters who registered all kinds of variants on a particular trademark will not try the same with Facebook names. Even those acting in good faith may find themselves ensnarled in the new provisions as Julia Roberts (the actress from Atlanta) finds her username already taken by Julia Roberts (the waitress from Iceland).
These are complex problems that deserve complex solutions. Currently, however, the only hint of a solution comes from Facebook’s explicit reservation of its right to reassign usernames by its own discretion. For a company plagued by transparency and control concerns, this seems an untenable solution. None of this is to say, of course, that Facebook acted maliciously, or wants to make life harder for its users.Instead, it seems more likely that Facebook thought it was simplifying something while it inadvertently created all manner of new complexities. Complexity, in any environment, contributes to disputes, So stay tuned.
Chris Peterson is an Associate of the National Center for Technology and Dispute Resollution (NCTDR) and Ethan Katsh is Director of NCTDR
