As BCE Inc. repositions itself from a mere phone company into an all-purpose new economy Internet company, it seems to have all the tools it needs. Its Sympatico Internet service has the largest subscriber base in Canada, it hopes to secure content for the Web with its $2.3-billion purchase of CTV, and it has a dot-com presence. Or does it? If you type BCE.com into your Internet browser looking for information on Bell Canada, you might be in for a bit of a shock. Instead of being transported to the BCE home page, you will find yourself logged onto an Internet site belonging to Berkeley Camera Engineering, a Hayward, Calif.-based software firm that supplies the US military and aerospace industry. You will also find yourself in the middle of a five-year spat for control of the BCE.com domain name.
Michael Peck, Berkeley Camera Engineering’s founder and president, registered the BCE.com domain name way back in 1993, and it was surfing along swimmingly until 1996, when Bell Canada seemed to suddenly discover the Web.
Between March and August 1996, Bell had the Berkeley site shut down twice–for almost a month in total–after complaining to Network Solutions Inc. (NSI), the Hendon, Va.-based private company empowered by the US government to police Internet domain names. Citing NSI’s own guidelines–which automatically gave any domain name to the company with a valid corresponding trademark–Bell claimed it was the rightful owner since it had a valid US trademark for BCE.
A subsequent investigation, however, found that both Berkeley and BCE had valid trademarks. So NSI reinstated Berkeley’s domain name.
That makes Berkeley the big winner, right? Not exactly. Peck maintains that the temporary loss of the domain name back in 1996 during negotiations on a crucial military contract cost his company more than US$140,000–and he wants Bell to pay. Bell, for its part, is willing to shell out only US$2,000 for the name, in part because it already owns Bell.ca. "The BCE.ca site is not a transactional site–it is a shareholder site," says Jean-Charles Robillard, a BCE spokesperson. "More than 90% of our shareholders are Canadian, and they know they can find us at BCE.ca." Maybe somebody should tell that to the hundreds of people who go to BCE.com looking for Bell: Peck claims to get as many as 1,000 of those hits every day, along with dozens of e-mails asking about everything from Bell’s latest financial statements to billing inquiries. "Whenever Bell has any announcements," Peck says, "I know it instantly because traffic on my site goes through the roof."
According to Brian O’Shaughnessy, a spokesperson with NSI, these types of disputes are becoming more and more common as an increasing number of companies discover the Web. The fact is, most North American businesses are still not online–and only about 20% have registered with the corresponding domain names. About 14 million domain names are currently registered, but that figure is expected to explode to more than 160 million in the next three years. "The most vexing element of the Internet is that it is both global in voice and local in nature," O’Shaughnessy says. The lesson for companies? Register your company and register your brands now–or risk being caught in the increasingly large worldwide web of confusion.
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