Domains: June 2007 Archives

The ICANN meeting in San Juan drew to a close yesterday. As can be expected ICANN released a number of press releases and statements and these are now being scrutinised by the domain industry. Bret Fausett, for example, is not overly impressed with Paul Twomey's statement on new gTLDs:

ICANN's President Paul Twomey has declared that ICANN's new gTLD policy is "on track." The claim reminds me of the way that Bush declared "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq back in 2003.

His feelings are echoed to a certain degree by those of Christopher Ambler:

Perhaps ICANN could start by, instead of instituting a whole new process, completing the introduction of the applications still pending from 2000. I would wager that of the 40 applications still pending, no more than 10 to 15 of them still want to proceed. That's a nice, small number. Let's clear the backlog and complete the last holdover - those of us who have, as Bret points out, been waiting for upwards of 10 years to compete.

So what exactly is happening?

Via Michael Gilmour comes news of a new "digg style" site for the domain / domainer industry - DNHour.com This could be very big or a complete damp squid - it will all depend on the takeup in the community. The site seems to be using Pligg, which is an open source PHP/MySQL script for managing Digg clones. The name isn't that catchy and doesn't really lend itself to the concept in my opinion - "dnhour it"? Sounds a bit silly. "kick it" or "digg it" works a lot better..

According to a post on Jay Westerdal's blog ICANN are to drop their fees per domain later this year. The announced reduction will be from 22 cents (US) to 20 cents (US) per domain. Unfortunately, as mentioned previously, the registries will be upping their prices later this year, so while ICANN maybe cutting the cost on one side someone else is increasing it on another NB: The ICANN fees are charged by ICANN to accredited registrars. These savings may or may not be passed onto registrants

ICANN is an international organisation, but how international is it really? If reading lists with lots of text is hard work, then maybe a more visual representation of the same data might be easier to digest. ICANN have made available a collection of maps that show a wealth of information about the domain world:

* the number of accredited registrars there are and the countries in which they are located; * board and staff representation by nationality; * ccTLD agreements; * ccTLD financial contributions; * the countries in which the 29 ICANN meetings have been held so far; * the global areas that the Regional Internet Registries cover; * the general location of root servers based on publicly available information; * root zone Whois information; * support for IDNs at TLD registries; * registrations for the current San Juan meeting.

The new maps section on the ICANN site is fascinating!

In the aftermath of the RegisterFly fiasco there has been a lot of discussion of how best to protect registrants should a registrar fail. When the .travel registry had financial issues the issue of registry failure made it onto the agenda. The ICANN meeting in San Juan this week is not without discussions of these and other topics, which were topics in a workshop held there earlier today.

Frank is covering the auction at TRAFFIC today. You can also listen in on WebmasterRadio.fm A couple of sales I noticed: blogging.com - $35k IrishWhiskey.com - $8k

Shortly before the close of DomainFest in LA this February the organisers announced that the 2008 edition was to be held in Las Vegas. They've since changed their minds, so DomainFest Global will be held in the Hollywood Renaissance hotel again next year from January 21st to 23rd. Full details on their site The next question is which airline to use....

The board of the IE Domain Registry are to vote on the proposed change to the registry rules governing "personal" IE domains. The registry consulted the main stakeholders prior to sending the proposal to the board for vote. It looks likely that the change will be introduced within the next two months.

Frank Michlick obviously likes to keep busy (I can empathise!) and has just launched a new domain industry group blog - domainnamenews.com

I was sworn to secrecy about DNZoom a few weeks ago, but as they're about to launch they've finally given me permission to talk about it! If you have a reasonably sized domain portfolio then you've probably got domains spread across multiple registrars, parking services, hosting companies and marketplaces. You buy domains off Sedo, monetise them with DomainSponsor and offer them for resale on Afernic. Sound familiar? What if you could manage all of your domains from one intuitive interface? DNZoom hopes to provide the solution to all your domaining needs in one place. I was given a guided tour of the beta interface by Dan Kimball, a couple of weeks ago and I was impressed. To date the system has been integrated with:

• enom
• tucows
• Eurodns
• Network Solutions
• NameCheap
• Register.com
• Sedo
• Afternic
• DomainSponsor

Other registrars, parking services and marketplaces will be added in the coming weeks, but it's pretty impressive already. It's a lot easier to see how it works if you look at the tour they've made available. I hope to have a "live" account in the next few days, so I'll update people once I've had a chance to explore.

The Registerfly website has been updated to reflect their loss of ICANN accreditation. You can now see the following on the main page:

NOTICE TO CONSUMERS. THE INTERNET CORPORATION FOR ASSIGNED NAMES AND NUMBERS - THE NON FOR PROFIT ENTITY THAT ADMINISTERS THE INTERNET'S DOMAIN NAME SYSTEM, HAS ISSUED A NOTICE OF TERMINATION OF THIS COMPANY'S ACCREDITATION TO SERVE AS AN INTERNET DOMAIN NAME REGISTRAR. PLEASE SEE WWW.ICANN.ORG FOR FURTHER INFORMATION.

About time too!

Whois data has been talked about quite a bit over the last few months. While there maybe valid reasons to hide who owns a domain via a proxy service of some kind outright abuse of the whois objects is a different matter. While checking a domain earlier this evening I came across the oddest whois output I'd ever seen:

Domain name: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.com Registrant Contact: xxxxxxxxxxxx.Com, POWERFUL WEB HOSTING - 20GB Disc - 500GB Tr NA NA (NA) NA Fax: HOST UNLIMITED DOMAINS *FREE* 1548 N Technology Way, #D13 Orem, UT 84097 US Administrative Contact: NA INC - ONLY 6.50 PER MONTH xxxxxxxxxxxx.Com (info@xxxxxxxxxxx) xxxxxxxxx Fax: xxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxx.Com, POWERFUL WEB HOSTING - 20GB Disc - 500GB Tr HOST UNLIMITED DOMAINS *FREE* Orem, UT 84097 US Technical Contact: NA INC - ONLY 6.50 PER MONTH xxxxx.Com (whois@xxxxx.com) xxxxxxxxxxx Fax: xxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxx.Com, POWERFUL WEB HOSTING - 20GB Disc - 500GB Tr HOST UNLIMITED DOMAINS *FREE* Orem, UT 84097 US

I've removed the company name from the whois output, but you get the idea. Is this even allowed under the ICANN rules?

John mentions that the IE ccTLD has broken the 80 thousand mark. The current count stands at 80216 live domains. (source IEDR) While not a huge ccTLD, the .ie namespace has been growing steadily. As the rules have become relaxed you can see a nice growth in the graph (see IEDR stats for details)

Nominet's planned upgrades seemed to have run into some minor issues leading to delays with the automaton and other backend systems.

As the domain industry matures the number of domain related industry events grows also. Trying to keep track of them all is time consuming to say the least, so I was delighted when Frank mentioned that he'd setup a new site specifically for this: DN Calendar

I've been following the antics of EUBrowser for some time now, but I almost missed the Google domains! John, luckily, spotted that little move. I didn't spot the handover, as the domains were subject to a UDRP that was cancelled, so no decision was published. To date we've seen only a handful of their domains being moved back to the holders of the intellectual property that was being infringed. The highest profile squat that still doesn't seem to have been contested, at least not in public, is still bebo.ie. At present it is pointing to a "site" that was very obviously put together to keep the IP lawyers at bay, while also infringing IP - bebo.hu. So the EUBrowser pair aren't just after .ie domains.. they also seem to like the idea of doing the same in Eastern Europe. Do they honestly think that their registrations will pass the test if they are ever challenged by Bebo? I somehow doubt it. It reminds me of the Skype.co.uk decision.

The IE Domain Registry is currently revising the policy that governs the registration of personal domain names such as "johndoe.ie". I've covered the story in more depth on my main blog.

The first anniversary of .eu has come and gone and with it many EU domains have ceased to exist. At the beginning of last month I was wondering how many EU domains would drop off the 'net completely and it now seems that the number was in excess of 250k. John speculates that a lot of the domains that were not renewed were purely speculative registrations, however he also notes that some people have taken to hiding their registrations by removing the DNS:

The Jay Westerdal/Ray King operation (using eight UK front companies) removed the nameserver data from at least 40K of their warehoused .eu domains in an effort to hide them. A significant percentage of .eu domains are hidden like this in order to evade detection because many of these warehoused domains would have trademark and intellectual property rights issues.

As the .eu registration rules did not permit registrations from non-EU nationals many of the domainers outside the EU resorted to using European Union agents. Whether the costs involved were ultimately worth it or not is still open to debate.

So far this year has been a very busy year for ICANN. The aftermath of the RegisterFly meltdown is having a very tangible knockon effect, while .travel's "close call" has also opened up a whole range of questions that might not have been asked otherwise. So what would happen if a registry (not a registrar) were to fail? That's one of the questions that is currently being asked and will be a topic for discussion at the next ICANN meeting in San Juan later this month. At the registrar level the pressing question in the light of RegisterFly has been data escrow which is aimed at avoiding future issues with registrant data:

Through the RDE program, ICANN seeks to ensure protection of registrants in the event of registrar failure or other termination of a registrar's accreditation agreement. Through this RFP ICANN seeks to engage an agent to provide RDE services for those registrars who elect not to escrow data with an independent third-party escrow agent

Of course there is one serious issue with any of these plans - it cannot account for the data input by the end user. Previous studies of whois data revealed a high level of inaccuracy, which this kind of "solution" would not fix. Whois, however, is also a very hot topic for debate at present, as there are very different opinions on what it should and shouldn't reveal.

The acquistion of SnapNames has provoked some interest in the domain related blogspace. Michael Gilmour points to Frank Schilling, who brings a very different view to the deal and draws parallels with the traditional auction houses. Jay Westerdal follows up his original post with the email that I had mentioned the other day. Of course with all this talk of the SnapNames acquistion I should have mentioned that eNom (DemandMedia) are now routing their expired domains via SnapNames according to Frank.

I mentioned recently that Tralliance, who run the .travel registry, were in financial difficulty. According to a statement from Tralliance that recently appeared on CircleID the company has received extra funding from Dancing Bear Investments, Inc. As far as press releases / statements go this one is a classic. It's so ambiguous you'd have to wonder why they even bothered releasing it. Did they get 100 dollars or 100 million dollars? There is, of course, the usual affirmation in the product / service on offer:

According to Ed Cespedes, theglobe.com’s President, “the agreement with Dancing Bear Investments demonstrates Mr. Egan’s continuing commitment to theglobe.com, which now consists mainly of our Tralliance operations. We continue to believe in Tralliance and the .travel top level domain.”

Is this a temporary respite or will they be able to turn the company around?

In a digital world news travels fast. SnapNames CEO, Sudhir Bhagwan, has already sent out an email to all their clients to notify them of the acquisition and to assure them that it is "business as usual":

It's important that you understand there will be no changes to the way SnapNames provides its services. This is a combination of two industry leaders with outstanding reputations for serving domain name investors and customers at all levels. We were attracted to Oversee for many reasons, including the opportunity to offer SnapNames customers a greater breadth of service offerings. Together, the two companies can provide services that support our customers' needs throughout the entire life cycle of a domain name, including procurement, monetization and sales.

He goes onto mention that the transaction will probably be completed in mid-June and that more information will be available on their site. If you go to the SnapNames' site you can view a FAQ about the merger / acquisition which covers some of the questions that people might be asking...

As the year progresses the number of mergers and acquistions in the domain industry is increasing at an impressive rate. Hot on the heels of GoDaddy's acquisition (saving?) of RegisterFly another media company acquires a domain company. Is anyone beginning to see a pattern emerging? Oversee.net has acquired SnapNames according to a post on Jay Westerdal's blog. SnapNames describes itself as:

the first commercially available technology for "back-ordering" a currently registered domain name. This pioneering service helped customers gain access to domain names that were thought to be forever out of reach. In reality, most domain names cycle back into the market at some point in time, though without specialized help, most people are unable to find or buy them.

It's an interesting acquisition for Oversee.net which already owns DomainSponsor as well as a very interesting portfolio of domains. Are they going to start competing in the aftermarket or is this going to be run as a completely separate entity from the "mother ship"? Most acquisitions do not have an immediate effect, so it will probably be a couple of months before we notice any changes (if there are to be any).