Domains: May 2007 Archives

It wasn't that long ago that I mentioned the launch of Domainers' Magazine. Now it looks like there maybe a new kid on the block - Modern Domainer, which describes itself as:

Modern Domainer speaks for the thousands of business professionals who have found ways to monetize domain names. Our magazine publishes six times a year and offers fresh perspectives, in-depth analyses and emerging trends. Whether you are breaking-in, keeping-up or getting ahead, Modern Domainer works for you.

The first issue is due for publication in the middle of June. While details on the editorial content are a bit scant at present there is a list of upcoming topics, which include issues such as technologies, legal issues and "breaking into domaining". Does this mean that the domaining industry is going mainstream, or merely that entrepeneurs are cashing in on the side? Only time will tell.

As was suggested a few days ago, GoDaddy have taken over RegisterFly's domains and customers. Migrating all the data across should prove to be an interesting test for GoDaddy's staff but, regardless of the technicalities, it signals an end to the limbo in which the domains (and clients) were being held since earlier this year. As I mentioned yesterday, the RegisterFly site still appears to be open for business. The official ICANN blog carries the full story

One of the strongest selling points of a regulated ccTLD is security and peace of mind. What that translates into in practice is that there is a slightly higher degree of control over who gets to register domains. In Ireland, for example, the IEDR has been able to vaunt the IE ccTLD due to its positive results in a recent McAfee siteadvisor survey. The same study gave a very positive rank to AU namespace. While this kind of reports are wonderful, deregulation to some degree is also a very positive thing. So why is MelbourneIT so against the entire idea? In a recent interview Theo Hnarakis, their CEO, expressed his reservations about the deregulation. It makes for interesting reading, though you would have to question their motivation.

According to a recent post on the ICANN blog Kevin Medina, head of RegisterFly, is being held in contempt of court:

The Court held Registerfly and Kevin Medina personally to be in contempt of the Court’s earlier Preliminary Injunction Order. So the Court has has ordered Kevin Medina and RegisterFly to publish on its website, within 48 hours, a notice telling people about the termination of it’s accreditation as the Court had set forth in the earlier Preliminary Injunction. The Court also ordered Kevin Medina and RegisterFly to comply with all other aspects of the Preliminary Injunction that it had earlier issued by no later than June 1, 2007 .

The crazy thing is that the RegisterFly site looks and feels as if it were open for business. There is absolutely no indication that the company is suffering from any issues or that it has lost its ICANN accreditation. There are, however, some subtle differences to the website text, as references to the ICANN accreditation seem to have been removed when compared with an older version of the site from 2006. But would people from outside the industry be aware of this? Personally I doubt it.

Jay Westerdal suggests that GoDaddy maybe buying part of RegisterFly. Anyone who has been folllowing the domain industry in recent months would be aware of the RegisterFly meltdown, which has caused issues for thousands of registrants worldwide. There will be mixed feelings surrounding this type of acquisition, but it is surely preferable to the limbo that many of RegisterFly's clients have been facing for the last couple of months.

It looks like 2007 is going to be an awkward year for the domain world. Earlier we had the collapse of RegisterFly, now we have the strong possibility of the .travel domain going bust. The .travel domain has always been an oddity. The idea behind it is fairly obvious, but when you combine the strict rules, price and length of the domain it becomes apparent why it has been such a damp squid. To date a mere 25 thousand .travel domains have been registered. When you compare that to .cat it becomes quite silly. The .cat TLD is aimed at Catalan culture and has managed to get almost the same number of registrations in a shorter period of time! According to recent filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission the company behind Tralliance, TheGlobe.com Inc., will run out of cash later this month:

As of May 4, 2007, the Company had a cash and cash equivalents balance of approximately $480,000. Notwithstanding previous cost reduction actions taken by the Company and its recent decision to shutdown its unprofitable computer games and VoIP telephony services businesses in March 2007 (see Note 3, “Discontinued Operations”), the Company continues to incur substantial consolidated operating losses, although reduced in comparison with prior periods, and management believes that the Company will continue to be unprofitable in the foreseeable future. Based upon the Company’s current financial condition, as discussed above, and without the infusion of additional capital, management does not believe that the Company will be able to fund its operations beyond May 2007.

So what happens then? With nobody to cover the costs or run the TLD what happens to it? On a positive note the registrant data is a lot safer than in the case of a registrar collapse and Neustar have been managing the backend operations for the registry. Does ICANN even have the procedures in place to deal with this kind of situation? The situation will become clearer over the next few weeks (hopefully!)

Will you be renewing your .eu domain? Even if you renew it for year two, will you bother for year 3? How many .eu domains are going to be dropped this year? It's an interesting question. At its height .eu had over 2.6 million domains active, though that has already dropped to 2.3 million and is still dropping....

Unlike with .com domains .eu actually lets you know when a domain is due for release ie. when it will be available for registration again. For example: % % WHOIS xxxxxxxxxx Domain: xxxxxxxxxxx Status: SUSPENDED(QUARANTINE) Registered: Sat Apr 22 2006 Available: Sat Jun 9 2007 I've removed the actual domain name from the whois output as it belonged to a client, however you can easily see the difference in output. With a live domain the output is like this: % % WHOIS isquattedyour Domain: isquattedyour Status: REGISTERED Registered: Mon Apr 24 2006 (I've removed the extra bits with DNS details etc)