Oleg Bogatov: Google as a company left me with a rather strange impression

In recent weeks, the Ukrainian internet has been witnessing legal disputes over the google.ua domain name. As a reminder, in February, the Kyiv Commercial Court ruled that the delegation of the google.ua domain to GOU OGLE LLC was illegal, ordered Hostmaster to cancel the delegation of the google.ua domain name, and ordered GOU OGLE LLC to cease using the commercial name "Google" in its domain name.

The Kyiv Court of Appeal upheld this same decision a month ago. Now, the companies "GOU OGLE" and "Hostmaster" have filed a cassation appeal to the Supreme Commercial Court of Ukraine seeking to overturn this decision.

Infonic managed to interview the former owner of the google.ua domain, Oleg Bogatov, in which he answered several questions regarding this high-profile domain dispute.

Oleg Bogatov,former owner of google.ua:

There are rumors circulating online that you have filed a cassation appeal against the appellate court's decision. Could you confirm or deny this information?

I haven't owned the google.ua domain for over two years. It currently belongs to Go Ogle. A year ago, on July 8th, Kommersant-Ukraine even published a retraction of its own article: "Mr. Bogatov is not a party to the legal dispute with Google and, accordingly, did not appeal the court ruling in Google's lawsuit against Go Ogle LLC."

However, I am following the circumstances of this case, as it affects my interests as the owner of other domains in the .ua zone.

Many experts believe that Google's demand to abolish delegation is incorrect, but what do you think about this?

I agree. Essentially, this requirement violates the delegation rules in the .ua zone for the sole reason that Google Inc. was unable to seize the google.ua domain based on its own trademark (honestly, I haven't yet understood why).

As a result, a precedent is being set for registering a domain through the courts, relying not on a trademark, but on the plaintiff's business name. The situation is like a banana republic in the 1960s and 1970s: a major American corporation bends local legislation to its own advantage :). Only instead of United Fruit Company, in our case, it's Google Inc.

Did Google try to resolve the domain name transfer issue peacefully?

Google as a company left a rather strange impression on me. It's generally considered a cutting-edge, innovative company, but my observations suggest it feels more like a collection of retards.

For example, when I was still the owner of google.ua, I read a story about how Google got its current base domain in the Ukrainian segment of the web—google.com.ua. It turned out that the guys from Silicon Valley (or rather, from the semi-offshore Delaware) had managed to miss out on that one, too. And certain individuals hiding under the euphemism "Ukrainian Internet community" were forced to intercept the domain in 2003 and, according to the official version, practically forcibly give it to Google Inc. Otherwise, they would have had to park it on something like google.in.ua.

Here's another example: a few months after transferring the rights to google.ua to Go Google, I received a lawsuit from lawyers hired by Vladimir Dolgov, the head of Google Russia (if I'm not mistaken, it was the Ukrainian branch of the Moscow law firm Gorodissky & Partners) demanding that they hand over the trademark and domain. We spent about six months arguing in court until Ukrpatent lawyers managed to convince them that the trademark and domain no longer belonged to me. After that, Google's legal team was replaced, but no court has ever found grounds to uphold any claims against me.

I don't know exactly why Google is so careless in Ukraine. But I can imagine it stems from a lack of respect for this particular market. After all, Google co-founder Sergey Brin once said that Russia, where he was raised until he was six, is "Nigeria in the snow." I can't even begin to guess what Brin thinks of neighboring Ukraine. Perhaps it's "Benin on the Black Sea."

When registering a trademark and then a domain, what did you expect?

It's hard to say what exactly I was thinking back in 2005 when I registered this domain. Perhaps it was that the best way to search the web is to find your loved one. Which, by the way, you can easily verify by visiting google.ua :).

Do you consider the decisions of Ukrainian courts fair?

Today, everyone is saying that Ukraine's judicial system is corrupt and therefore ineffective. However, there are some bright spots.

Are you prepared now for the domain delegation to be cancelled?

The question is not for me.

Do you think it's time for the Ukrainian internet to drop the requirement for a registered trademark for the .UA domain?

Personally, I don't think so. Thanks to this system, I am the legal owner of all my .ua domains, as I have the corresponding officially registered trademarks (thanks to this, by the way, I can't even be called a cybersquatter :)). As a result, even an attempt to take away my domain, for example, in the .nl domain zone (you can read about this onhttp://jurblog.com.ua/2009/04/metinvest/) ended in failure for the plaintiff, the Dutch company Metinvest Holdings NV. Incidentally, it is precisely my experience with the World Intellectual Property Organization's Arbitration and Mediation Center that allows me to judge the ineffectiveness of the domestic judicial system.

Cyrillic domain name registrations will begin on July 22nd at com.ua/kiev.ua. Do you think the Ukrainian internet needs Cyrillic second-level domains, such as Google.ua?

I can still find some sense in completely Cyrillic domains. However, domains whose first part is written in Cyrillic and the second in Latin are clearly a ploy.