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.

Thu 14th July 2011
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Another Day, Another New TLD Trademark Application: .Store - Pair files three trademark applications for .store. More people are trying to trademark potential top level domain names now that ICANN has approved the program. The latest attempt is by Eric Doerr of Delaware and Greg Disler of Pennsylvania. The pair filed applications for three marks; two for .store and one for dotStore. The U.S. Patent and Trademark office won’t issue trademarks for top level domain names, but that hasn’t stopped people from trying to slide ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Law Firm Found Guilty of Reverse Domain Name Hijacking After Filing “Astonishing” Case - Law firm files “baseless” case to get four letter domain name. I really hope a new law firm that seeks to “break with routine thinking in the legal industry” doesn’t have an intellectual property practice. Denmark lawfirm IUNO Advokatpartnerselskab has lost a UDRP for the IUNO.com and has been found guilty of reverse domain name hijacking. The domain name was registered in 2000; the law firm just opened its doors this year. Panelist Tony Willoughby had ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
WIPO Panel Censures Law Firm for Misleading Panel - Panel blasts law firm for either trying to mislead panel or being “inexcusably careless”. Last year a World Intellectual Property Organization panelist called a case represented by law firm Novagraaf Nederland a “flagrant abuse” of the UDRP. In that case, the law firm told the panel that its client had been in business from 1994 but didn’t disclose that it had just recently changed its name to reflect the domain name at issue. Novagraaf Nederland also ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
.Com and .Net Price Increases Announced - Here comes your yearly fee increase. VeriSign has announced its almost-annual price increases for .com and .net domain names. The wholesale cost from VeriSign for .com domain names will increase from $7.34 to $7.85 on January 15, 2012 and the registry fee for .net domain names will increase from $4.65 to $5.11. The VeriSign fee doesn’t include ICANN’s 18 cent fee per year. So the wholesale cost of a .com domain name will be $8.03 and a .net will be $5.29. VeriSign ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Epik Acquires Domain Name Registrar IntrustDomains - Company acquires domain name registrar with a checkered reputation. Epik has acquired domain name registrar IntrustDomains for an undisclosed account. In a blog post, Epik founder Rob Monster explains that the acquisition will provide a number of services for managing your domain name assets. In addition to registering domain names, Epik customers will get access to a self-service backorder system. They will also be able to manage their domains at other registrars ... read more ...
Wed 13th July 2011
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
DomainTools Releases API - New API makes it easier to access domain data databases. DomainTools has released a new API that will make it easier for power users to access its data and will enable web site owners to integrate new tools into their sites. The API encompasses almost all of the data currently available on DomainTools including whois history, reverse whois, nameserver reports, registrant alerts, and domain suggestions. Here are some examples of how DomainTools says you can use the ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Is Your Domain Broker Working for You or a Other Party? - Marketplace brokers need to clearly state their interests. A couple months ago the founder of a startup reached out to me for advice about getting the domain name that matched their company name. The founder wasn’t having any luck contacting the owner of the domain name but it was listed on a marketplace. He tried to negotiate through the marketplace but ultimately the domain owner was unresponsive. I suggested he engage the marketplace’s brokers directly given ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Children’s Book Author Loses Pinkalicious Domain Dispute - Pinkalicious author is red in the face. Victoria Kann, author of the popular children’s book series Pinkalicious, has lost a domain name dispute for Pinkalicious.com. Kann filed the dispute last month with National Arbitration Forum. There was a fatal flaw in her case: the domain name was registered well before she started publishing the book series. Kann argued that she had rights in the “Pinkalicious” mark dating to 2004 when she entered into a contract to ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN
Go Daddy Explains Why UDRP Filings Have Gone Up - Increased enforcement and ease of filing UDRPs are possible reasons for increased filings. I’m very critical of commentary that suggests an increase in UDRP filings directly correlates to an increase in cybersquatting. After all, the rate of UDRP filings compared to total registrations remains historically low. When you have “new filers” suddenly filing over 100 cases in a single year, it leads me to believe that enforcement has increased more than anything ... read more ...
Tue 12th July 2011
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Branding Lesson: Cloud.com Was Much Better Than VMOps - Domain name boosted VMops in the hot cloud market. “Citrix Buys Cloud.com for more than $200 million” That sounds much better than what the headline could have been: “Citrix Buys VMOps” Cloud.com started its life as VMops. But when Meetup.com’s founder put Cloud.com up for auction, VMOps took notice. In February 2010 the company acquired the domain name on the heels of a $17 million funding round. I caught up with Cloud.com VP of Business Development ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Amazon.com Buys CloudPlayer.com Domain Name - Company gets domain name for its new music service. When Amazon.com announced its music-anywhere service and corresponding Cloud Player a few months ago, it was missing a key ingredient — the domain name CloudPlayer.com. It has belatedly fixed that problem. On July 11 the whois record for CloudPlayer.com transferred to Amazon. It hasn’t yet started forwarding the domain name to its product page, however. Cloud Player is the application to access your Amazon ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Go Daddy Gets Gripe Site NoDaddy.com - Go Daddy gets control of NoDaddy.com domain name. GoDaddy.com now owns NoDaddy.com, Kevin Murphy reports for The Register. NoDaddy.com was set up as a gripe site after the domain registrar suspended the registration of security mailing list SecLists.org. Since then it has been a gathering place for customers and ex-employees of the world’s largest domain name registrar. They aired their grievances there, often times sending traffic to Domain Name Wire articles ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Latona’s Adds Expense Details to Latest Web Sites for Sale - More web sites for sale, this time with hard costs data. Rick Latona has released a new batch of developed web sites for sale. This time around he has added expense details so you can get an idea of how much it costs to operate the site. Still, the expense details don’t seem to take into consideration how much time the site operators spend on the site. You’ll want to find that out before placing an offer. Included are two insurance lead generation sites. One ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Australian Government and Other End User Domain Purchases This Week - A look at Afternic sales for the week. I didn’t find a lot of interesting end user domain purchases through Afternic this week. The amount of disclosed sales was lower than usual thanks to the holiday weekend and a number of domains are still pending transfer. But here’s a look at some of the more interesting sales: Austrialia’s Government Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency spent $3,588 on CleanEnergyFuture.com. Medical company YGM Group, LLC ... read more ...
Mon 11th July 2011
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
NameMedia Expands With London Office - Company expands European footprint. NameMedia is expanding its European footprint with a new office in London. The company will announce the expansion today. The domain seller, which operates Afternic and BuyDomains, has hired Nadya Morozova as its European Business Development Manager. Morozova was previously Director of Community Outreach for the .tel registry. Afternic is well known for its sales prowess through the U.S. registrar channel. But earlier this year ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Cricket Communications Reaches Settlement Over Cricket.com - Parties working on settlement documents to resolve trademark infringement lawsuit. Cricket Communications and Cricket.com owner Global Cricket Ventures have reached a “settlement in principle” over the parties’ trademark infringement suit. Cricket Communications filed the suit in February alleging that Cricket.com was charading as a cricket sport site but was no more than a site created to take advantage of the wireless carriers’ trademark. The company alleged ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
How To Quickly Get Your Domain Names on Afternic Premium - Here’s the simplest way to bulk upload domains to Afternic’s Premium level service. Listing domain names on services that offer syndicated, instant-transfer listings can be a bit of work. It takes more than just uploading your domain names; at a minimum you need to set prices and often times add categories. Today I updated my Afternic Premium Promotion list by adding a couple hundred more domains that were in my Moniker account. Some of these were in my Afternic ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN
Two New TLD Conferences Coming Up - Conferences in San Francisco and Munich are quickly approaching. Now that the new top level domain name program is “approved”, it’s time to get down to business. Two upcoming conferences will help applicants and service providers do just that. Next month .nxt returns to San Francisco August 24-26. The event debuted earlier this year under the leadership of former ICANN staffer Kieren McCarthy. Conference passes are available for $695 and hotel rooms at the ... read more ...
Sat 9th July 2011
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Disc Golf Associations Buys DiscGolf.com Domain Name - Company that “founded” disc golf buys DiscGolf.com. Go to any major park in Austin during the day and you’ll see people “throwing plastic”, a.k.a. playing disc golf. If not trademark attorneys are around you might also call it “frisbee golf”. It’s like golf but cheaper and less pretentious. Heck, the church down the street dedicated much of its green space to an 18 hole disc golf course designed by a famous course designer. So apparently God approves ... read more ...
Fri 8th July 2011
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
LivingSocial Gets Irish - Daily deals site gets LivingSocial.ie domain name. LivingSocial has a new home on the web in Ireland: LivingSocial.ie. .Ie is the country code domain name for Ireland. Last month the daily deals site filed for arbitration to get the domain name. Until now it has been offering deals in Ireland on its main LivingSocial.com web address. The case has been terminated and the owner transferred the domain name to LivingSocial’s parent company, Hungry Machine, Inc. Groupon ... read more ...
Thu 7th July 2011
Written by DomainNameWire in EN
VeriSign’s Pat Kane Discusses New TLDs and IDNs - With new TLDs approved, VeriSign gets ready to move forward. Domain name registries are getting down to business now that ICANN has finally approved the new top level domain name program. I recently caught up with Pat Kane, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Verisign Naming Services, to discuss what this means for .com and the domain name industry in general. “All boats will rise together with new gTLDs because this is about growing our industry through ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Domain Registrar Offers Social Login to Registrar Account - Australian domain register lets you login with your Facebook account. Domain name registrar Whois.com.au has enabled social login functions to access your registrar account. In other words, instead of logging in with your registrar credentials you can login with Facebook, Twitter, etc. I’m not aware of any other registrars that offer this, but I’m sure there are some off my radar. My first reaction was that this scares me. If your Facebook account is compromised ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
VeriSign Improves Domain Tag Cloud with DomainView - Tool lets you monitor real time domain registration trends. After writing about VeriSign’s new beta NXD data tool yesterday, I also learned that the company has upgraded its Domain Tag Cloud into a neat tool to monitor real time domain registration trends. DomainView incorporates the same data from the tag cloud — keyword frequency in recently registered domain names — and brings it to multiple formats. It also adds domain suggestions so you can see available ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN
Technology Review Asks if New TLDs Will “End a Rent-Seeking of Domain Name Speculators” - Unsound analysis of what new TLDs will do to the value of .com. Christopher Mims has just penned a new article for MIT’s Technology Review asking “Will New Top Level Domains End the Rent-Seeking of Domain Name Speculators?” Let’s take a look at some of Mims’ reasons for why new top level domain names might reduce the amount domainers can charge for .com domains: Existing top level domains — .com, .org, etc. — have become crowded. You can make the argument ... read more ...
Wed 6th July 2011
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
For Oversee.net, ShopWiki Is Another Ill-Timed Acquisition - Latest big acquisition hit hard by Google algorithm updates. Oversee.net has made a few big acquisitions over the years, and something always seems to go wrong. There was Moniker, which the company bought at the peak of the domain name auction market. Then there was SnapNames, which lost its best source of domains names (Network Solutions) to a joint venture with eNom shortly thereafter. And who can forget about the Halvarez shill bidding scandal. It appears that ... read more ...