Internet gateway company faces name collision with .box – Domain Name Wire

Company uses .box as an internal address on its internet gateways.

The maker of FRITZ!Box internet gateways made a disturbing discovery this year: .box is a real top level domain name.

The company discovered this after someone registered fritz .box.

For years, the company has used fritz .box as the internal login for customers. Customers type that address into a browser to log in and change settings.

With .box now a real top level domain, there’s a risk that someone will go to a website rather than the internal site. This sort of conflict is called a name collision.

In a cybersquatting case against the domain (pdf), the panel described the problem:

One of the Complainant’s main products is a line of Internet routers named “FRITZ!Box”. The Complainant provides evidence showing that, since at least 2004, the internal or private network domain name for accessing the user/configuration interface on these devices has been fritz .box. This is used by its customers in place of a local network IP address. The Complainant adds that network devices in the relevant local area network are provided with Domain Name System (DNS) hostnames in the format “[device-name].fritz .box” by the Complainant’s product. The fritz .box private domain name is printed on the label of all such products as well as in instruction manuals. A customer will type the fritz .box domain name into their browser to reach a login page in order to gain access to such device settings as Wi-Fi SSID name, password, parental controls, and certain smart home services including telephony and DVB-C television watching. If the attempt to resolve said domain name results in a query to the public DNS, it may return results for the disputed domain name, with potentially unintended or harmful results.

The domain name owner did not respond to the dispute. The privacy service for the domain informed the panel that the domain was registered to John Doe with a fictitious address and phone number. The World Intellectual Property Organization panel that decided the case in favor of the Complainant asked that the matter of the fake registration data be referred to ICANN.