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.

Sun 10th April 2011
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Oversee.net Trademark Attempt Rejected - Oversee.net trademark for travel web site denied. Oversee.net has failed to get a trademark for its LowFares.com brand. LowFares.com is a travel comparison site and part of the company’s network of vertical web sites. A key issue for Oversee.net was that another company already has a trademark for LowestFare.com. Oversee.net tried to argue that the services it offers on LowFares.com are distinct from those on LowestFare.com. LowFares.com compares travel prices ... read more ...
Fri 8th April 2011
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
DOMAINfest Barcelona Registration Opens and TRAFFIC Price Increase Imminent - Registration is now open for DOMAINfest’s return to Europe, and prices are about to increase on TRAFFIC. Registration for DOMAINfest Barcelona is now available for $695 through the end of April. The event takes place June 7-9 at the Pullman Barcelona Skipper hotel. Barcelona was the location of the first ever DOMAINfest. Group rate hotel reservations are also available for EUR 195, but you must download and email/fax a reservation form. Elsewhere on the domain ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Bob Parsons Threatens Copyright Infringement Over Elephant Hunting Videos - Go Daddy founder sends infringement notices to web sites hosting stills of his video. Video of Bob Parsons’ elephant hunting trip in Zimbabwe has made the rounds on the internet over the past week, with many people posting screenshots from it on their web site. Now Parsons is sending infringement notices to sites that are displaying stills from his video. Below is a partial copy of an email sent to alleged infringers. I have verified with BayTSP that it is working ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Could Amazon or Facebook Challenge Google on Ads? - Two powerful technology companies could make a run at Google. Domain name owners often complain about the duopoly of ad syndication options from Google and Yahoo/Bing. Lots of ad networks have tried to compete but have been unable to. But could two large web companies make a run at it? Facebook and Amazon are the best contenders, and I’d actually place my money on Amazon. Amazon recently started a self-serve pay-per-click ad network, and may be gearing up to create ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
3D.com Domain Name Goes Up For Sale - Ryan Colby scores 3D.com brokerage contract. Whether or not you think 3D is the next big thing in entertainment (and a lot of domainers apparently think so), you have to admit that the domain name 3D.com is a winner. Sedo domain broker Ryan Colby just got the domain name under an exclusive brokerage contract to sell. Compete.com estimates that the site gets thousands of unique visitors per month, and that’s without an active web site. Take a look at 3D.com to view ... read more ...
Thu 7th April 2011
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Elephant Shooting Kerfuffle Doesn’t Hurt Go Daddy’s Business - Controversy doesn’t have noticeable affect on domain registrar’s business. Was Bob Parson’s elephant hunting video a stealth PR move? Maybe a little bit, but given that he posted a similar video last year and nary an elephant lover noticed, I’m not sure how he could have predicted a different result this year. But one thing’s for sure: it hasn’t had a significant negative impact on Go Daddy’s business. I’m been tracking DailyChanges.com over the past ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
National Arbitration Forum Gets The Headline Right - UDRP filings up. That doesn’t mean cybersquatting is increasing. Today National Arbitration Forum released statistics about its UDRP caseload from 2010. It was up 24% from 2009 to 2,177 cases. The group’s press release headline is: National Arbitration Forum Reports a 24 Percent Increase in Domain Name Dispute Filings in 2010 This is an accurate and factual statement. Compare this to World Intellectual Property Forum’s headline when it released numbers last ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
EFF: Certificate Authorities Signing Non Existent Top Level Domain Names - EFF says digital certificate signers aren’t doing their job. SSL certificate providers gain trust by validating the domain names they are signing. So you might be surprised that they’re signing certificates for domain names that can’t even exist. Electronic Frontier Foundation dug up over a thousand certificates for domain names attached to non existent top level domain names. Many of these were probably entered in error, but consider “TLDs” such as .trust, ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
TribalWars Loses Fight Against BuyDomains for TribalWars.com - Popular online game will need to pay if it wants .com domain name. MMORPG TribalWars has lost an arbitration case over the domain name TribalWars.com, which is owned by BuyDomains. InnoGames, the company behind the game, filed the dispute at World Intellectual Property Forum in January. The arbitration panel determined that the domain name was not registered in bad faith because it was acquired prior to TribalWars gaining any sort of global rights in the name. In ... read more ...
Wed 6th April 2011
Written by DomainNameWire in EN
TechCrunch Gets to a Heart of New Top Level Domain Failure - .eu has 3.4 million registrations. TechCrunch calls it a failure. Is .eu a success or failure? The country code domain name representing a whole bunch of countries has 3.4 million registrations after five years. That’s pretty darn good compared to most recent domain name launches. But Robin Wauters of TechCrunch calls it a failure in a post today “3.4 million .eu domain names registered in five years – I call dismal failure“. I think he’s right. Wauters ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Go Daddy Suspended 150,000 Websites in 2010 - Go Daddy took down 150,000 sites last year for illegal or malicious activity. In February Go Daddy told a congressional committee that it took down a whopping 36,000 rogue pharamcy websites last year. Today in a hearing on “Promoting Investment and Protecting Commerce Online: Legitimate Sites v. Parasites, Part II”” Go Daddy general counsel Christine Jones will testify that the company suspended 150,000 websites in 2010 that were “found to be engaged in illegal ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN
Sahar Sarid’s Conceptualist.com Goes Dark - Blog turns into a parked page. Is this the end of blogging for domain name investor Sahar Sarid? A reader tipped me off today that Conceptualist.com no longer resolves to his blog. Instead it points to a DomainSponsor parked page. The page has one of those banners that says “This Domain is Not For Sale unless you know us”. The mailing address for the privacy service on Conceptualist.com’s whois record changed earlier this year. This all seems a bit odd to me, ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Time Warner Cybersquatter Uses a “I Could Have Been Worse” Defense - Guys actually tries to defend himself in no-brainer cybersquatting case. Last month I wrote about how Time Warner filed a UDRP to get 41 domain names including its brands and “3D”. It just won the case, which comes as no surprise. But it’s a very entertaining read. The registrant of the domain names must have read stories about cybersquatters striking it big by selling domains to trademark holders. The panelist sums up his defense as: a. Other domain names ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
5,800 New .Jobs Sites Created for Veterans - Group activates 5,800 second level domains to target jobs to U.S. veterans. DirectEmployers Association and .jobs registry Employ Media need to do something to bolster a “do-good” status, and they may have found something: use .jobs domains for military veterans. They just created 5,800 sites for veterans and their families, including veterans.jobs. There are sites for each Military Occupational Classification (MOC) Crosswalk, e.g. www.42F.jobs, www.25B.jobs, ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
PLA.com Lawsuit Against Nat Cohen’s Telepathy Dismissed - Project Leadership Associates drops case over PLA.com. In September Project Leadership Associates Inc. sued Nat Cohen’s Telepathy, Inc. in an effort to get the domain name PLA.com. After many months of back and forth, including counterclaims by Telepathy against Project Leadership Associates, the case has been dropped. Cohen released the following statement: Project Leadership Associates and Telepathy Inc. are pleased to announce the dismissal with prejudice of ... read more ...
Tue 5th April 2011
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Company Hit with UDRP for Typo of Its Own Domain Name - ShoeBuy.com registered typo of its own domain name, only to have to defends itself for cybersquatting. Imagine you’re an online shoe retailer. To protect against cybersquatting you register over 100 common typos of your domain name. Then one day someone comes along and says that one of the typos of your domain name infringes on its trademark. That’s what happened in the recently decided UDRP for Shoeby v. Shoebuy.com for the domain ShoeBy.com. Shoeby is a Netherlands ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
ClickZ Loses Dispute for United Kingdom Domain Name - Web site’s attempt to get Clickz.co.uk rebuffed. Popular online marketing web site ClickZ.com has lost an arbitration case to get the domain name ClickZ.co.uk. Party Domain Limited registered Clickz.co.uk back in 1999. The domain points to a lander for the company that has links to some of it online party supply stores. ClickZ publisher Incisive Financial Publishing Limited sent a letter to Party Domain Limited in November 2010 asking it to clarify its intentions ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Top 10 .Mobi Registrars and What It Says About New TLDs - Half of all .mobi registrations are at one domain registrar. I was just looking through tallies of total domain names per registrar by TLD as of the end of 2010. This graph of .mobi registrations at the end of December is telling: There’s only one thing to notice on this graph: Go Daddy. The domain registrar manages 49% of the total base of .mobi. This is in line with the registrar’s claim that it registers about half of all new domain names, since .mobi is ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Nominet Releases Reverse Whois System - Nominet releases full version of reverse whois system. Nominet just released a full production version of what essentially amounts to a reverse whois tool for .uk domain names. [Update: the service has been around for a while but Nominet just released a new version, including similarity searching and email alerts.] Public Register Search Service lets users search for domain names registered by a particular legal entity and/or those of a similar name. This is very ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Sedo Sells Mind.com for EUR 120,000 - Domain broker turns in a good six figure sale. Sedo completed the sale of Mind.com over the past week for $ EUR 120,000 to an unknown buyer. The last listed owner of the domain name was Chandler, Arizona-based LeapLab Group. Here are other notable sales from Sedo this past week. .com mahjonggames.com 46000 USD sylt.com 35000 EUR curiocity.com 25000 USD hirecar.com 21000 USD zenkei.com 18200 USD naruko.com 15000 USD pastries.com 12500 USD silverearrings.com 11500 USD getnow.com 10600 USD nfluence.com 10000 USD spiritualnetwork.com 10000 USD motortalk.com 10000 USD nanchong.com 10000 USD shipu.com 9802 USD solitaireonline.com 8995 USD highmedia.com 8288 USD tvenip.com 8000 EUR kaviari.com 8000 USD miam.com 8000 USD dealable.com 8000 USD clickedin.com 7500 USD football411.com 7500 USD propertydealer.com 7500 USD 734.com 7173 EUR judicial.com 7100 USD backup2net.com 7000 USD rapidstart.com 6500 USD footballinsider.com 6100 USD 0y.com 6100 USD juo.com 6000 USD nachbarin.com 5662 USD 3dstereoscopy.com 5600 USD mustache.com 5523 USD tvplayer.com 5500 EUR length.com 5099 USD provogue.com 5001 GBP eurofitness.com 5000 EUR truenatural.com 5000 USD bookmytrip.com 5000 EUR cheerlife.com 5000 USD randomactsofkindness.com 5000 USD hotvegasdeals.com 5000 USD cevita.com 5000 USD ccTLDs seo.in 18500 USD indiretta.it 14000 EUR payu.in 10000 USD elektro-fahrrad.de 9800 EUR delights.de 8000 EUR kitchendoors.co.uk 8000 GBP flohmaerkte.de 7500 EUR lyoness.ru 5600 EUR pdh.es 5500 EUR warehousefinder.hu 5000 EUR available.me 5000 USD printmedien.de 5000 EUR ryan.nl 4950 EUR hools.pl 4000 EUR vivreici.fr 4000 EUR Other webhosting.eu 10099 USD law.eu 8812 USD watchfinder.net 5000 USD gumball.net 4300 USD berufsunfähigkeitsversicherung.net 3990 EUR pferdewetten.net 3800 EUR ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Domain Madness Postponed Until Next Week - Online bidding fails and auction is postponed until next week. Running domain name auctions is hard. Promoting an auction and handling the technical back end is even harder. Just ask Rick Latona. Today Domain Madness was supposed to hold its third annual auction on the new Boxcar platform. Unfortunately the platform wilted under the pressure. I logged in an hour after the auction was supposed to start, only to see organizers call it quits. Auction organizers said ... read more ...
Mon 4th April 2011
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Chicago Food Critic Finally Gets Stolen ChicagoRestaurant.com Domain Name Back - Long domain name battle has a happy ending. Chicago restaurant guru David M. Lissner of Dining Chicago used ChicagoRestaurant.com for ten years. Then one day in 2009 – poof! – it was gone. It was suddenly registered to someone in Turkey. Lissner’s technical service provider (i.e. web designer/hosting firm) was listed as the administrative contact for the domain name. The company disappeared and the email address it used for the administrative contact expired. ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Hey Bit.ly, What Do we Have to Say About .ly Domains Now? - Another example of the dangers of .ly domain names. Ever since unrest broke out in Libya Bit.ly has been saying they have no worries about their domain name. They point to the .ly caches outside of Libya. (.ly is the country code domain for Libya.) But as I’ve pointed out, they should be worried. Just because some of the root nameservers are located outside of Libya doesn’t mean .ly domain names are safe. Libya could decide to simply delete a particular registration. ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Bob Parsons Updates Elephant Shooting Video - Edits shine more positive light on Bob Parsons hunting trip. Bob Parsons has defended himself in several interviews since he posted a video of him shooting an elephant in Zimbabwe. But he made a tacit admission that his video could have been less offensive by editing it. The new video loses the AC/DC soundtrack, omits the pictures of Parsons standing next to the dead elephant holding his gun, omits a picture of a bunch of villagers surrounding him with Go Daddy ... read more ...
Fri 1st April 2011
Written by DomainNameWire in EN
Domainer Apr Fools Roundup - Plenty to laugh at on this April Fools’ Day April Fools day came early for domainers yesterday when TechCrunch posted an article titled “Google Inadvertently Classifies Google Places As A “Content Farm” And Removes From Search Index”. It purported that Google Places was briefly removed from Google search and there was a war between the web spam team and Google ad teams. It also said that a Google Executive spent two weeks with Demand Media’s Richard ... read more ...