OSAKA, Japan (BRAIN) — Shimano says it successfully petitioned the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers to have an e-commerce website taken down because it was posing as a Shimano company site.
Shimano warned the public about the site in October.
"After discovering the site in question, we promptly sent a petition for its closure to the relevant agencies and organizations, including sending a warning letter, and we have confirmed that the site was closed in early December," Shimano announced Wednesday. "We will continue to take resolute action against any suspicious websites posing as our company or our group."
Visitors to the site now see a notice from ICANN that it has been suspended "as a result of dispute resolution proceedings pursuant to the Uniform Rapid Suspension System (URS)."
According to ICANN, the URS is a quicker, alternative to its regular Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy, for cases where rights holders are "experiencing the most clear-cut cases of infringement."
The site was suspended for the length of its registration, which ends in October 2023. The site was registered with Dynadot.com and its registrant's identity was shielded by Dynadot's "Super Privacy Service." The registrant did not defend its use of the domain. Shimano's URS complaint was reviewed by FORUM, a Minneapolis firm that is one of three independent organizations authorized by ICANN to make URS determinations. The determination was made on Dec. 2.
The URS system is rarely used, but SRAM successfully used it in 2016 to remove sram.red, a site registered by a person in Beijing, China. The site was being redirected to www.shimano-china.com, Shimano's Chinese-language homepage.
