Domains: August 2007 Archives

Sex sells, so it's hardly surprising that Neil Edwards, CEO of Mtld, the dotmobi registry, in a post on the company blog last night chose to catch people's attention with the headline: "sex.mobi To Go On Sale, And More" Was he really that interested in sex? Probably not more than any other guy, but what he was interested in doing was showcasing a couple of more dotmobi sites and tools that have gone live in the last few days and weeks. Interestingly enough one of the comments points out that google.mobi is up and running and is currently pointing to mobile versions of their services. Personally I'd love to see ebay.mobi and a few more high profile ones being pushed by their owners. Amazon's mobile site can be reached at Amazon.mobi and I actually used it the other day to pre-order a DVD. However I haven't actually seen it referred to using that URL.

Kieren, who has been setting up new things with ICANN since he joined them, has an interesting post on the ICANN blog today discussing both new and old TLDs and ones that just didn't happen. It's well worth a read. Why wasn't .nom approved? Why did they opt for .name?

Jay Westerdal has announced that the next Domain Roundtable will be held in San Francisco from April 18th - 20th 2008. The most recent event was held last week in Seattle.

Today's Irish edition of the Sunday Times has an article on the cybersquatters referred to commonly as "EUBrowser" entitled "Cybersquat Firm Lurks in Digital Hub". I've mentioned them in the past, as they lost several WIPO cases including adidas.ie, buy-sell.ie and a couple of Google squats (googl.ie and googel.ie) that were settled before WIPO had a chance to publish a decision. The Sunday Times' Mark Tighe spoke to several people including myself, John McCormack and David Curtin of the IE Domain Registry to get industry opinion on their activities. The interview itself is amusing:

Varga and Petho say they plan to fight the WIPO decision in the Irish courts. Varga said:"Large companies have had plenty of time to register their desired names, so it is their fault if they choose not to. As registrations work on a first-come, first-served basis each business should secure its online existence at an early stage."

Oh give over guys! You infringed Google, Adidas and Buy and Sell's IP and got caught. Do you honestly expect any court anywhere, never mind Ireland, to suddenly rewrite intellectual property law to suit your nefarious needs? You were caught. You lost. Deal with it! But they just don't know when to stop:

The pair claim the idea for adidas.ie came not from the sportswear company but from the acronym of advanced detailed internet directory and search

That was mentioned in their attempted defence at WIPO. It reminds me of the skype.co.uk case. And what of bebo.ie? I'm amazed that there hasn't been a case about that yet. And of course the thing that is going to really get up people's noses is that these guys are receiving aid from the Irish government, as they are based in The Digital Hub which is described as:

..an Irish Government initiative to create an international centre of excellence for knowledge, innovation and creativity focused on digital content and technology enterprises.

The quote from me is quite short and reflects my opinion:

Michele Neylon, managing director of Blacknight Internet Solutions, a webhosting company, said: "These guys are the biggest single holders of generic and dubious .ie domains. Generic names are fine, but these two have registered so many names that impinge on other people's rights I don't know how they expect to get away with it."

To put it another way. I don't take issue with their registration of the generic names. I do take serious issue with their registration of names that blatantly infringe on other people's intellectual property.

As regulars here probably know I run an Irish hosting and domain registration company. We released a bit of software that might be of interest to Nominet registrars earlier this evening. NB: If you aren't a Nominet registrar it won't be of any interest / use to you

Weather.mobi is the first of the premium dotmobi domains to go live. The registry made an official announcement a few hours ago and the site is already up and running. Unlike paramount.mobi, that reserves a lot of its premium content for US subscribers only, weather.mobi provides local weather information for even the smallest of Irish towns. The Weather Channel have been providing their forecast data in a wide variety of formats for quite some time, so I guess it should come as little surprise that the mobile site is such a masterpiece. Further information on the dotmobi blog

Whenever I meet up with colleagues in the domain industry from outside Ireland they are always amazed at the size of the IE namespace. While it's not the smallest ccTLD in the world, it is one of the smallest in Europe, especially when compared to its neighbours. Of course one of the many reasons for this is the policy. While the policy surrounding registrations has relaxed considerably it is still quite closed to outsiders. If you are not an Irish company you will need to prove that you have an entitlement to an IE domain by way of trade or trademark. This explains in part why there has been relatively no domaining within the IE namespace. The other side of the coin is the aftermarket. While the domain name aftermarket maybe dominated by sales in .com, there is a vibrant trade in ccTLDs such as co.uk and .de. In the IE namespace there is no official aftermarket and any public advertising of domain names for sale actually infringes the registration rules. Put simply, if you register a .ie you better make use of it, as you won't be able to sell it on for profit! While this is probably a good thing overall it wouldn't be altogether negative if people could trade in IE domains at some level. Would a dropcatching service for IE domains be of interest to people? From talking to both registrants and potential registrants there probably is a market for that kind of service. However if any company, apart from the registry, were to start offering those services in public they would probably run afoul of the registry's own regulations. And before you ask about "tasting".. there isn't any! Well, you could, in theory, but it would be extremely awkward in practice and I can't see how you'd actually make any money from it ... it's not as if you could auction off the attractive domains or anything like that...

ICANN has announced that it is seeking input and feedback on the topic of domain tasting. (See their announcement for full details) Interestingly enough Michael Gilmour published an article a couple of days ago covering the same topic - "Why domain tasting is great!", which will probably raise a few hackles! One point that in particular caught my eye:

Domains that are picked up in tasting that have TradeMark problems are already covered by relevant "give me back my domains" processes, either in or out of court. It's the domain owners risk to keep TM domains.

While that may be fine for big corporates, it's hardly palatable for smaller businesses that cannot afford to pay UDRP / WIPO fees plus the legal teams needed to prepare their cases.

If the copyright lobby can't catch up to their TM domains shifting every few days then this process can be solved by the registry stepping in to "lock" domains at the registry rather than the registrar where most domain tasting is taking place

Err what now? Registries can't really do that, which is why they rely on WIPO / UDRP for most of the gtlds.

If everyone benefits who is screaming about domain tasting? The copyright/intellectual property lawyers are having real problems with domain tasting. By the time they manage to get their C&Ds and cases together the domain is no longer registered. It's a moving target and no one to sue!

That might be the case if the domains in question aren't getting any traffic, but if they are then they're not going to be deleted by the registrar... Traffic = revenue, which is why the tasters do it, or did I miss something? Don't get me wrong, he does raise some very valid points and he think he's trying to provoke a reaction and debate more than anything else.

I wrote recently about how usage as opposed to fluffy PR was the best strategy to promote a new TLD. The guys over in dotmobi obviously agree (they even included my post in their latest newsletter!) and their most recent article is about the takeup of the domain as measured by search engine results / pages indexed. It's worth reading, though I'd have to take some of the comments with a really large pinch of salt.

According to recent reports Microsoft's MSN messenger is blocking URLs using the .info extension It seems that this change only happened in the last couple of days. Has Affilias been made aware of this change? Is it an anti-phishing / anti-spam measure? Full story here

Just when I thought I'd heard the end of Registerfly ..... It looks like a mailserver in RegisterFly was rebooted last night / this morning, as I'm being flooded with mails that I should have received towards the end of last year. It's kind of amusing when I think of the headaches that they caused for the industry over the last few months and now they're filling up my inbox even though they're no longer really around to do it .... Mail servers - ya gotta love 'em!

One of the key elements in any domain space is usage. It doesn't matter how potentially "cool" or "interesting" a TLD is if nobody is actually using it to provide content. It may be overused and totally abused, but "content is king"! The guys in dotmobi posted yesterday about some of the more interesting domains that they had come across recently. What did that lead to? Well I actually got out my phone and browsed the sites to see what all the fuss was about and I was truly impressed. You don't need fancy videos to promote the dotmobi namespace if you can get content providers to engage and start providing content that people want to consume. The dotmobi blog is full of tips, insider news and other content that make you want to get involved! I even finished and published an article on dotmobi that I'd started writing months ago!

Tomorrow is the final day that Moniker will be accepting submissions for the TRAFFIC conference being held this October

The WIPO decision in the case of The Saul Zaentz Company d/b/a Tolkien Enterprises v. ECWD, Inc. caught my eye as I am a Tolkien fan. It's an interesting decision on some levels, but is also quite disturbing on others. The registrant has posted a reply of sorts on the site (which hasn't transferred / moved as yet) which raises a couple of interesting points:

DRUNKEN HOBBIT SAYS GOOD BYE - BECAUSE I CAN'T BE BOTHERED Since the the good folks that wrote the Lord of the Rings books and Movie's feel that the Drunken Hobbit website was a concept taken based on some Hobbit that appears in their Books and Movie's this website will no longer be around. I will say that if I made a decent amount of money from this website I would have gone to battle with them over this "Hobbit" claims and the Trademark they filed for and have simply to prove a point, however it is not worth my effort, time or money to do so. Unlike specific companies which claim in certain things or feel that everything is based on what they have done and accomplished I'm an honest person. Fact of the matter is, I have never seen or read one single Tolkien book of Movie ever, I am not aware of any characters or even the plot of the entire series, regardless of how successful they feel the movie is, the fact remains that ion THIS COUNTRY there are hard working people such as myself, or better yet people such as myself that do things out of fun. The Drunken Hobbit was created by me as a site about a friend of mine that Looked like a furry midget, in my world I call furry midget's hobbit's, not knowing that someone feels they own the word "Hobbit", or claim to have created that word. Below you will find some information that clearly shows that no matter how large the Tolkien people and the Lord of the Rings books, movies or magazines are the fact of the matter is that Tolkien wasn't even sure he made the word up, he just choose to trademark it. I challenge any of you to do a search for "Prior Art" and how many cases for companies claiming the rights to certain things had those lawsuits dropped from court. Again I'm a busy guy and this website was developed for fun, not because I knew about someone else's material, nor do I care. Honestly in my opinion which I am allowed to have in THIS COUNTRY, is that the people behind these claims truly need to find something else to put their energy into. Enjoy some of the information below, and as for the DRUNKEN hobbit website, I'm signing off and saying Thank you for a few years of checking out my site. It's only been in use like 2 years (all though the lord of the Rings people claim it's been in use since 2003, the fact of the matter is there's more information simply NOT TRUE. Again thank you to all my loyal Bookmarkers and the people that visit the Drunken Hobbit Daily, please feel free to remove your bookmarks because the site will only stay like this until I transfer the domain to them and they can do whatever they choose with it.

Funnily enough the site was being used as links site for porn sites and had this graphic at the top of the page: If you look at the full size image you can clearly see the furry feet that feature in Tolkien's writings ... However there is one part of the registrant's defence that is quite interesting and that is the reference to "prior art". Was Tolkien the inventor of the word "hobbit" or had the word been used previously? Of course if the site had been something more "positive" then maybe the WIPO decision would have gone differently or the trademark holder wouldn't have lodged the complaint in the first place ...