Author Archives: DomainNameWire

About DomainNameWire

Domain Name Wire is a blog that deals with the domain name sector. The blog covers a range of domain related topics ranging from issues concerning expiring domains, monetization, domain registries and registrars, ICANN, policy, law etc. The blog began in March, 2005, after Mr. Allemann had dropped out of meetings to become involved in domain portfolio company, iREIT. The project began as a hobby to keep him involved in the domaining business, and then became his full-time business.

Mon 6th May 2013
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
.Secure field take note: association isn’t giving adult heading conflict yet - Company that filed .secure trademark application appeals USPTO ruling. The Wisconsin company that wants to trademark .secure hasn’t given up yet. I first wrote about Asif LLC in 2010 when it filed a trademark application for .secure. It also filed an application to trademark .bank. The application was originally filed on an intent-to-use basis. Later, Asif said it was using the term in commerce for “domain registration services”. How was it doing that in 2011, ... read more ...
 
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Donuts: Hurry up. Verisign: delayed down. - Many new TLD applicants will take a less-than-ideal contract if it means a faster time to market. When it comes to the new top level domain registry agreement, what you have to gain or lose from new TLDs being introduced will greatly shape your opion. Verisign has submitted two separate comments on the agreement, both of which blast ICANN for dumping the bottom up process and adding a unilateral right to amend the contract. From Verisign’s perspective, a delay in ... read more ...
Fri 3rd May 2013
Written by DomainNameWire in EN
Top 5 domain news stories from April - A look back at the top five domain name stories in April. What happens when you get nailed for reverse domain name hijacking but really want the domain? You pay through the nose. Procter Gamble’s purchase of Swash.com was one of last month’s top stories on Domain Name Wire. 1. U.S. Department of Commerce not supporting USPS objection to .mail top level domains – the DOC explained that it is not behind the United States Postal Services’ strange objection ... read more ...
 
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1,700 .ng domains purebred given cost cut, .ng domain hacks on Sedo - 97% price drop leads to more .ng domain registrations and a growing number of Sedo listings. Yesterday I wrote about how Nigeria Internet Registration Association (NIRA), the registry for .ng domain names, had slashed the price of second level .ng domain registrations by 97%. The new price is equivalent to about $95 USD; previously it was $3,165 per year. That has sparked a jump in registrations, even at a price that’s relatively high for a second level domain registration. The ... read more ...
Thu 2nd May 2013
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A demeanour during .Tel’s 14 year, £25 million journey - Telnic has lost £25 million since it was founded — and much of that was before .tel even launched. It’s been a long and winding road for many new top level domain applicants. But most of the delays and challenges new TLD applicants have faced pale in comparison to the very long, very expensive road that .tel registry Telnic has traveled. What is .tel? .Tel is a unique sponsored top level domain. A couple things make .tel particularly unique. First, you can’t ... read more ...
 
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Afternic finish user report: 28 finish user domain sales - A startup in stealth mode, an ad agency, and two churches bought domain names last week. Before jumping into the Afternic end user sales list, here’s a bonus end user sale that didn’t happen through Afternic but I learned about: ViSalus, which owns VI.com, bought VI.co.uk for $18,500. OK, now on to Afternic sales: A startup in stealth mode bought Seeq.com for $33,000. The sale was through GoDaddy.com. Ad agency GSDM bought StoryofAmerica.com for $1,500. Investment ... read more ...
 
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Don’t let your son-in-law register your domain name - He might hold onto it if he gets a divorce. Occasionally a UDRP is filed that’s part of a family feud. Earlier this year I wrote about a how a guy filed a UDRP against his brother. Now here’s another one: a man filed a UDRP against his ex-son-in-law. According to the complainant, his family gave him his last name as a .com back in 2002. But apparently his son-in-law had actually done the registration and did it in his own name. Later, the complainant’s daughter ... read more ...
 
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Nigeria slashes second turn .ng registration cost by 97% - Domains used to cost $3,165 per year. According to an article on This Day Live, Nigeria Internet Registration Association (NIRA), the registry for .ng domain names, has reduced the price of registering a second level .ng domain name by 97% to NGN 15,000. That’s equivalent to about $95 USD. Previously, the group had been charging NGN 500,000, or $3,165 per year, for a second level .ng registration. But it actually used to cost a lot more than that. When NIRA started ... read more ...
Wed 1st May 2013
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Slow learners: The Snugg is about to remove the 2nd UDRP - Company files case against Roy Messer’s Snug.com. iPad case maker lost a UDRP for Snugg.com last year. Now it is going after Snugg.com, a case it should lose for the same reason: Snug.com was registered in 1999.Some people just don’t get it. Consider Charon International Trading Limited, makers of The Snugg iPad cases. The company owns TheSnugg.com, and desperately wants a shorter domain. So in February it filed a UDRP against the owner of Snugg.com. The UDRP ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Law organisation sues association for promulgation false heading renovation notices - Law firm sues to stop company that it alleges sends misleading trademark notices. Domain name owners often receive official looking notices by snail mail warning them that their domains are about to expire and asking them to renew. Often times these notices look like invoices and ask recipients to pay very high prices to keep their domain name active. Back in 2005 two people were fined $2.3 million for one such scheme. Anyone who has a federal trademark is also familiar ... read more ...
 
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Sex-settlement: Manwin and ICM Registry come to terms - Deal settles antitrust lawsuit and countersuit between adult site operator and .xxx domain registry. .XXX domain name registry ICM Registry and adult site operator Manwin have settled their legal battle, the companies announced today. As part of the deal, ICM will offer significantly discounted .xxx domain registrations in May and will offer similar promotions in the future. The wholesale cost for .xxx domains will be $7.85 in May, the same price as .com. Registrars ... read more ...
 
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Go Daddy Auctions sells 39,488 domains in April - Go Daddy Auctions sold close to 40,000 domains last month. Go Daddy has updated its Domain Market Report to reflect April numbers. In total, Go Daddy Auctions sold 39,488 domains during the month. This number is typically revised up after the initial report. In March Go Daddy sold 43,409 domains. The top ten sales last month were: seeq.com $33,000 – bought by a company in stealth mode. Afternic listing. thetoystore.com $18,000 staycation.com $16,667 – a valuable ... read more ...
 
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20 finish user domain sales from Sedo - A list of 20 end user domain buys at Sedo last week. Perhaps the most recognizable end user buyer at Sedo last week was Korbel, maker of sparkling wine. But also take a look at click-to-call.com, which shows a whois address at Sedo’s office in Boston. BlueWave Communications in New York bought BWC.ch for 1,190 EUR. Advertising agency Sonnen Werbung Verlag bought Sonnen.ch for 1,000 EUR. UK company Lifetime Legal bought Executor.co.uk for 12,000 GBP. Herbs company ... read more ...
 
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Verisign blasts ICANN over due registry agreement - Verisign says unilateral right to amend is alive and well in proposed contract. Verisign senior vice presidents Pat Kane and Richard Goshorn have sent a letter to ICANN blasting the inclusion of amendment right clauses in the proposed new registry agreement. In the sometimes snarky letter, Verisign claims that ICANN’s unilateral right to amend the new gTLD agreement is alive and well, despite some changes to language in the latest version. Verisign’s interests ... read more ...
Tue 30th April 2013
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Top Level Domain Holdings releases financials by December - TLDH releases annual report and earnings. Top Level Domain Holdings, the only publicly traded pure-play top level domain applicant, today released its annual report and audited financials for the fourteen month period ending December 2012 (pdf). The company ended 2012 with £2.418 million in cash and cash equivalents on its books. That’s down from £7.074 million at the end of 2011. That’s not a lot of cash with which to fight over contested strings, but the ... read more ...
 
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pair Networks sues PairShare for heading infringement - pair Networks takes issue with music app called PairShare. Web hosting company pair Networks has sued Pairshare, LLC for trademark infringement. PairShare offers an app that lets people share music between iPhones, iPods, and iPads via bluetooth. In the lawsuit (pdf), pair Networks argues that PairShare violates its trademarks, including for the term “Pair”. Although pair Networks doesn’t compete directly with PairShare, it argues that offering downloadable ... read more ...
 
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Verisign gets obvious for triggering web crawling formed on registry data - .Com registry awarded patent for using registry data to trigger web crawling. With Verisign analyzing how to profit from its patent portfolio, competitors should pay close attention to the company’s new patents. Today Verisign was awarded U.S. Patent 8,433,700 (pdf) for “Method and system for triggering web crawling based on registry data”. The patent describes ways in which a registry can provide data to other companies, such as search engines, that may help ... read more ...
Mon 29th April 2013
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Site promises to beget pronounceable, brief domain names - New site claims to generate short domain names that can be pronounced and are available for registration. A new site says it can help entrepreneurs find short, pronounceable, and unregistered .com domain names that they can brand for their business. Pronouncey.com, which just launched (and itself was recently hand registered) it pretty simple. You just select the number of characters, hit generate, and then it randomly creates a domain name that it claims is pronounceable. Does ... read more ...
 
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Uniregistry, TLDH strike understanding to run .country - Two companies will take equal equity in joint venture to run .country top level domain name. The two applicants for the top level domain name .country have entered into an agreement to partner, rather than fight, over .country. Top Level Domain Holdings issued a press release this morning announcing the deal between its company and Frank Schilling’s company, Uniregistry. This is the first publicly announced agreement that will resolve a contention set, as no other ... read more ...
 
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Marchex sells 50 domains for $1.4 million – here are a tip 20 - Company reports improved domain name sales compared to previous quarter. Marchex’s Archeo, Inc. sold 50 domains in the first quarter of this year for a total of $1.4 million. Archeo, Inc. is the domain name division of Marchex, which the company hopes to soon spin off into its own publicly traded company. The results were much better than in Q4 2012, when the company sold 31 domains for $863,000. The average price per sale was about the same in both quarters, at ... read more ...
 
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After being found guilty of RDNH, Procter & Gamble pays adult for Swash.com - PG buys Swash.com after embarrassing legal approach. Last month Procter Gamble became one of the largest companies to be found guilty of reverse domain name hijacking after losing a domain dispute for Swash.com. Among the company’s many sins in its UDRP filing was that it provided incorrect sales numbers for its ‘swash’ brand. As it turns out, the company was looking to launch a brand new brand called Swash and wanted to get the domain name. It went about ... read more ...
 
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7 finish users who bought domains from Marchex final quarter - PG, TomTom among companies that sprung for big ticket domains last quarter. Earlier today Marchex posted its top 20 domain sales for last quarter (sans price tags). As with the company’s prior list of top 500 all time domain sales, the sales were to a mix of end users and domainers/lead gen types. Here are some of the end user purchases last quarter: Procter Gamble bought Swash.com after being found guilty of trying reverse domain name hijacking to steal the domain. Sunripe ... read more ...
Sun 28th April 2013
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Philadelphia 76ers buy Sevens.com from Warren Royal for new D-League franchise - Domain investor sells domain name for new development league team. Yesterday the Philadelphia 76ers NBA team announced that it acquired the operating rights for a team in the National Basketball Association Development League. The team will play in Delaware and be called the Delaware 87ers. Their nickname will be the “Sevens”. Just how long have the 76ers been working on acquiring the rights to this D-league team? Well, on November 26, 2012 they registered the ... read more ...
Fri 26th April 2013
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4 things Verisign pronounced on the financier discussion call - From Google to where it stashes its cash, here’s what Verisign told analysts yesterday. Yesterday Verisign announced earnings for the first quarter and held its investor conference call. Here are four key things the company explained. Google is slowing our growth. Verisign blames the reduced growth rate in its domain base on overall macroeconomic trends (especially in Europe) and on changes to Google’s search algorithms. On yesterday’s conference call, it certainly ... read more ...
 
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Philadelphia Inquirer wants to possess a tenure “Philly” - Company loses dispute over domain name that includes “Philly”. Philadelphia’s dominant newspaper, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and its parent company apparently think they own the term “Philly”. True, the newspaper’s home on the web is Philly.com. But anyone who has ever eaten a Philly cheesesteak knows that it’s a common nickname for the city. So it’s with a bit of surprise that the company decided to go after a local news site, Philly2Philly.com, claiming ... read more ...