Here's the The Lowdown
from DNJournal.com! Updated daily to
fill you in on the latest buzz going around the domain name
industry!
Compiled
by Ron Jackson (Editor/Publisher)
Mainstream
media is now confirming what we told you just after
midnight last night (thanks to Jay Westerdal at DomainTools.com
Blog) - that ICANN has rejected creation of a
.xxx extension. It looks like ICANN may now have a second
lawsuit to deal with (in addition to the class action suit filed
against them in the Registerfly affair). The Associated
Press had this quote from ICM Registry
President Stuart Lawley (ICM would have run .xxx if it
had been approved): "We are extremely disappointed by the
board's action today. It is not supportable for any of the
reasons articulated by the board, ignores the rules ICANN itself
adopted for the RFP (request for proposal), and makes a
mockery of ICANN bylaws' prohibition of unjustifiable
discriminatory treatment." Lawley added that ICM would pursue
the matter further and when pressed by an Associated Press
reporter if that could include a lawsuit against ICANN, Lawley
said: "I would go so far as to say likely."
Posted March
30, 2007
The
ICANN Board has reportedly decided to reject a
new .xxx extension for adult domains. The board was
supposed to announce their vote today (Friday, March 30), but in a
nice scoop, Jay Westerdal reported on his DomainTools.com
blog last night that the board had just met behind closed
doors in Lisbon, Portugal and decided to kill the .xxx
proposal. Westerdal noted "It is a long standing tradition
at ICANN to have the secret board meeting the night before the
official board meeting. ICANN skeptics and critics have been
calling for more transparency for a long time but ICANN
continues closed meetings."
Posted March
30, 2007
You
may soon need a scorecard to keep track of all of the
lawsuits flying around in the wake of the Registerfly.com
collapse. As we told you yesterday, a class action lawsuit
has been filed by a North Carolina attorney against
Registerfly, eNom and ICANN. Now comes word that
ICANN sent a letter
to Registerfly Wednesday warning them that ICANN would file a
lawsuit against the crumbling registrar today if
Registerfly did not turn its registration data over to ICANN by 3pm
Pacific Time. ICANN, who revoked Registerfly's
registrar accreditation (effective Saturday, March 31), needs
accurate data to try to determine who owns domains held by
Registerfly, so they can be moved to a different registrar. Much
of that data is believed to have been corrupted, lost or stolen
during the implosion at Registerfly. It has been estimated that
problems at Registerfly have resulted in as many as 75,000
domains being lost, including many used by active businesses.
Posted March 29, 2007
A
class action lawsuit had been filed against Registerfly,
eNom and ICANN. The lawsuit (Anne Martinez v
RegisterFly, ICANN et. al.) was filed by Attorney E.
Clarke Dummit of the Dummit Law Firm in Winston-Salem,
North Carolina. The suit alleges that RegisterFly has
systematically defrauded its customers who attempted to
register or renew Internet domain names, causing them to lose
their domain names, finances, and even entire businesses.
Dummit said "The
lawsuit was initially sealed due to fears of retribution
by RegisterFly.com towards plaintiff Anne Martinez for
filing the suit, but since then other concerns have
become more pressing, and the case was opened to the
public." In a press
release issued today, Dummit said "It
was clear that RegisterFly was in trouble, and the
accreditation agency of registrars, ICANN, knew it, but
ICANN did not perform its duty to protect the public and
continued to accredit RegisterFly and allow it to
perform as a registrar."
"In fact, ICANN, which
collects a fee for every domain sold through its
accredited registrars, did not give notice of
termination of ICANN's accreditation of RegisterFly
until the day AFTER attorney Dummit served ICANN
with this class action lawsuit. This provides further
evidence that it is time for the American Legal System
to step in and reign in this outrageous, illegal
behavior that has already harmed many people around the
world, and threatens to damage many more," Dummit
said. eNom was named in the suit because Registerfly was
an eNom reseller until eNom dropped them earlier this
year.
Posted March 28, 2007
As
the current ICANN meetingcontinues in Lisbon,
Portugal, I want to recommend writer Burke Hansen's
coverage of the conference for TheRegister.com to you,
especially Hansen's exceptionally insightful opening day piece, Of
ICANN and the Registrar Zombies. It's a great
summation of the Registerfly debacle, ICANN's role in it
and the debate over how to protect domain owners in the event of
another registrar meltdown. Hansen filed a second report from
Lisbon this morning, Intellectual
Property Debate Heats Up, as ICANN Looks to the Future,
that focuses on how ICANN awards new TLDs and on the sticky
issue of WhoIs privacy.
ICANN
says Registerfly is continuing to abuse customers
Meanwhile,
ICANN's problems with Registerfly continue to fester.
Yesterday ICANN General Counsel John O. Jeffrey
sent a letter
to Registerfly CEO Kevin Medina telling him
"his time was up". Jeffrey excoriated Medina
for failing to provide ICANN with accurate registrant
information, continuing to make it difficult for
customers to get their names out of Registerfly and for
ignoring ICANN's demand that Registerfly remove the
"ICANN accredited" logo from its website. When
ICANN revoked Registerfly's accreditation on March 16 it
demanded the company immediately remove ICANN's
trademarked logo. The actual revocation of registration
rights becomes effective Saturday (March 31), a
move that should finally put Registerfly out of the
registration business. Unfortunately, that will not
bring back the domains and online businesses that
customers of this shoddy outfit lost during the
registrar's collapse.
Posted March 28, 2007
The
dates and location for the next DOMAINfest
Conference were announced last night. It will be a
two-day Regional event in Amsterdam, HollandMay
16-17. The show will be held at
Hilton
Amsterdam
the Hilton Amsterdam
Hotel. DomainSponsor.com
organizes the DOMAINfest events which include both
Global and Regional editions. The company said the Regional
events are intended to reach even the smallest domain
businesses and bring them together with other local
domainers. The focus is on networking, coupled with two
to three in-depth content workshops with these events
held at locations around the world. The Global events
(which debuted with a successful 2007
conference in Hollywood, California)
are positioned as "the annual bringing together of
great domain industry minds from all over the world for
three intense days of learning and networking."
Organizers say those feature
all of the networking
typical of a Regional event but on a much larger scale.
You can register for the Amsterdam conference and learn
more at DOMAINfest.com.
Posted March 27, 2007
ICANN
opened its meeting in Lisbon, Portugal today
with a standing room only session on registrar reform
prompted by the Registerfly.com disaster that has caused
thousands of domain owners to lose control of their names and
even ownership of domains and businesses built on them. ICANN's
slow reaction to the Registerfly meltdown prompted a good deal
of criticism from audience members who spoke at the session.
ICANN's stance was that the criticism is unfair because their
enforcement powers over registrars are limited. Ten days ago,
ICANN did finally revoke Registerfly's registrar accreditation
(effective March 31) - but many think that action should have
come much sooner. ICANN provided a fact
sheet on the Registerfly mess before the meeting
started that details what happened from their viewpoint.
This
sad saga is a long way from being over. At least one attorney,
Peter Lagorio
(in conjunction with Counselseek, Inc.), is already investigating
Registerfly for a potential class action suit. There
has also been speculation in domain forums, such as DomainState.com,
that ICANN will also be a target in such a suit as a plaintiff
could claim they were negligent in not promptly responding to a flood of
consumer complaints about Registerfly that began over a year
ago.
Posted March 26, 2007
Though
this was the first day of official business at the ICANN
meeting, many people arrived
Jothan Frakes
in
Lisbon Sunday and
took part in some special educational sessions. One of the most
popular of those was a two-hour tutorial session on the domain
name aftermarket moderated by Jothan Frakes of DomainSponsor.com.
Panelists included Mason Cole (SnapNames.com), Tim
Schumacher (Sedo.com), Tom Murphy (NameMedia,
operators of BuyDomains.com and Afternic.com) and Emiliano
Pasqualetti (Domainsbot.com). A complete
transcript of that session is available on the ICANN
website and we recommend it to those interested in the latest
expert commentary on the domain name marketplace.
Posted March 26, 2007
International
Domain Names (IDNs) in the .biz extension will
be offered in the Chinese and Japanese languages
starting April 21. NeuStar, Inc. (the
operator of the .biz registry) has offered German .biz
IDNs since 2004 and Spanish, Danish, Swedish,
Norwegian and Icelandic IDNs since November 2006. Richard
Tindal, vice president of domain name services at NeuStar
said "China and Japan are two of the world's
largest markets for IDNs, and .biz is the first global domain to
implement Chinese and Japanese IDNs in a manner that fully
respects the linguistic cultures of both language groups." NeuStar
said its Chinese and Japanese IDN offerings make
available more than 19,000 Han and 178 Katakana andHiragana characters, which are commonly used in China,
Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan, and in Chinese and
Japanese communities around the world. The complete Chinese and
Japanese language tables can be found at www.neustar-registry.biz/idn.
Posted March 23, 2007
In
the wake of the Registerfly debacle, ICANN
has decided to explore a complete revamping of
their Registrar Accreditation Agreements (RAA)
and the entire Accreditation process. In a statement
posted on the ICANN website yesterday, the organization
charged with overseeing the domain name system said this
will be a prime topic of debate at the upcoming
ICANN meeting in Lisbon, PortugalMarch 26-30.
ICANN President and CEO Dr. Paul Twomey said
“Registrants suffer most from weaknesses in the RAA
and I want to make sure that ICANN’s accreditation
process and our agreement gives us the ability to
respond more strongly and flexibly in the future. All
ICANN stakeholders need to be involved in this debate.
But in particular I would like to see registrars and registrants
actively engaged in the discussion."
A new
non-profit voice for registrants, the Internet
Commerce Association, will have both its
Legal Counsel Phil Corwin and its Executive
Director Jude Augusta at the Lisbon meeting to
monitor and participate in this debate. While we agree
that registrants need to be protected in the event of
another registrar meltdown, it is also important to make
sure this issue isn't used as a trojan horse to set
policy aimed at further weakening the rights of domain
name owners.
ICA
Executive Director Judge Augusta (left)
and ICA Legal Counsel Phil Corwin
Suffice it
to say that ICANN has not earned a lot of trust in the
registrant community with past actions, so new policies
that are formulated in the aftermath of the Registerfly
collapse need to be carefully scrutinized by the ICA and
individual registrants - and we are sure they will be.
Posted March 22, 2007
If
you read our latest weekly
domain sales report that came out
last night, you may have noticed the $25,500 sale
of CreditCard.info. That ranks as the 5th highest
sale ever reported in that relatively new extension. .Info
continues to make steady progress even though it has
been overshadowed a bit in the past year by the release
of newer extensions like .mobi and .eu. Afilias,
the .info registry, recently celebrated its 4
millionth .info registration and they marked
the occasion by releasing an update
report on the extension's progress last
week. .Info is the 6th largest TLD in the world
(trailing only the original three global TLDs; .com,
.net and .org and two powerful country
codes, .de and .co.uk).
Initially,
.info was more popular in Europe than any other
region, but the new report notes that North America
is now the leader with 51% of all .info
registrations (Europe has dipped to 38% of the
total). The United States is by far the singe
largest user of .info, accounting for 48% of all
registrations (Germany is next at 11%).
Roland
LaPlante, Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer
for Afilias, said “.Info continues to be an Internet
address that individuals and businesses choose to
showcase their information on the Web. It is gaining
popularity worldwide, increasing overall sales volume
and even establishing itself as an emerging domain in
the aftermarket and pay-per-click (PPC) markets.” The
largest reported .info sale to date was NewYork.info
at $46,392. That name was sold in September 2006
through Moniker.com.
Roland
Laplante
Afilias VP & Chief Marketing Officer
Posted March
21, 2007
Online Ad Spend Growth Is Historic
- that is the arresting headline from a new report at
eMarketer.com
today. The article says that online ad spending revenues soared
from $12.5 billion in 2005 to $16.8 billion in
2006, a 34% jump in revenue in just one year. This is
also the third straight year that online ad spending has
risen by more than 30% from the previous year. The $16.8
million tally for 2006 exceeded what eMarketer had previously
predicted for the year by $400 million. The article noted "The
growth is not stopping, either...eMarketer estimates that
online ad spending will reach $36.5 billion in 2011.
Posted March 20, 2007
Chris
Sheridan at eNom Reseller Summit
Over
the weekend I saw a post in Jay
Westerdal'sDomainTools.com
blog that veteran Verisign
executive Chris Sheridan is moving to Demand
Media's eNom.com
to become their VP of Customer Service and Business
Development. As a Senior Account Manager at Verisign,
Sheridan has been based in Chicago, but he will
be relocating to Seattle to take up his new
responsibilities at eNom. Sheridan was a featured
speaker at eNom's first Reseller Summit in Las
Vegas earlier this month, where he presented
Verisign's 2007
Domain Name Industry Brief. We have
some highlights from the eNom event in our March
newsletter that went out to subscribers
tonight (you can sign up for the free monthly
email publication here).
Incidentally,
eNom's parent company (Demand Media) and company
founder Richard Rosenblatt will be the subject
of our April Cover Story (due out the weekend of April
7-8).
Posted March 19, 2007
The
Internet Commerce
Association has weighed in on the
controversial practice of domain tasting - an
unintended use of a 5-day registration grace period
that some entities, including some registrars, have employed
to scoop up virtually every domain name that expires
before returning domains that do not produce traffic to the
registry for a full refund. The grace period was meant
to provide a window in which honest registration mistakes
(like accidentally registering a mis-typed domain name) could
be corrected at no cost to the domain registrant.
ICA Legal
Counsel Phil Corwin sent a letter
to ICANN March 15 supporting a new initiative from
the Public Interest Registry (operators of the .org
registry) that will result in domain tasters being charged a
fee for "excess deletions". In the same
letter, Corwin took issue with comments made by WIPO Deputy
Director General Francis Gurry last week when Gurry, who is supposed to be an objective
observer, criticized domain investors in a widely distributed
press release. Corwin wrote, "Mr. Gurry clearly exhibits
a pronounced bias in favor of expansion of the
rights of trademark holders to the detriment of the equally
legitimate rights of domain name owners who have risked
considerable capital and labor to develop their domain
names as valuable properties monetized through the
provision of content and associated advertising."
Phil
Corwin
ICA Legal Counsel
"ICA members do not support
trademark infringement, but they resent having a senior
executive of the lead arbitrator of UDRP cases
characterize their business as one of “speculative gain,"
Corwin said.
Posted March 18, 2007
ICANN
has used the "nuclear option" on renegade
registrar Registerfly.com and yanked the company's
ICANN accreditation. ICANN sent Registerfly formal notice
yesterday that it will cease operating as an ICANN-Accredited Registrar on
March 31, 2007. Under the terms of the Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA), ICANN must provide 15 days written notice to RegisterFly of its intention to terminate.
Effective immediately ICANN has terminated RegisterFly's right to use the ICANN Accredited Registrar logo on its website.
Notice
of the action posted on the ICANN website says
"Between now and March 31, RegisterFly is required to unlock and provide all necessary
Auth codes to allow domain name transfers to occur. Any and all registrants wishing to transfer away from RegisterFly during this period should be allowed to do so efficiently and expeditiously."
ICANN
President and CEO Dr. Paul Twomey told Registerfly it's time to buzz off
ICANN President and CEO Dr. Paul Twomey said "Terminating accreditation is the strongest measure ICANN is able to take against RegisterFly under its
powers. ICANN has been frustrated and distressed by recent management confusion inside
RegisterFly. I completely understand the greater frustration and enormous difficulty that this has created for registrants."
When the Agreement is terminated, ICANN can approve a bulk transfer of all current RegisterFly domain names to another ICANN accredited Registrar.
"Of course, RegisterFly does not have to wait till then. They can request ICANN to approve a bulk transfer immediately. I call on RegisterFly to act in the interests of registrants and seek such a transfer from us straight away," Dr. Twomey said.
ICANN intends to hold a forum to discuss the reform of the Accreditation policy and process at its
upcoming meeting in Lisbon, Portugal March 26-30.
Posted March 17, 2007
As
we head into the weekend, I'd like to give everyone
a tip on a source for some great domain reading to catch up on
before the new business week begins.
Frank Schilling (of
Name Administration Inc.), regarded by many as the most
successful domain investor in the world, has started a new
blog called Seven
Mile (named after the beach in front of Frank's Cayman
Islands home). In just the past week he has posted more
valuable commentary than most people produce in a year's worth
of blogging.
This is an opportunity to learn the ins and outs
of the game directly from a guy whose domain
credentials are unmatched. Schilling's new passion seems to be
giving back to the industry that has treated him so well. In
addition to pouring his energy and expertise into the new blog,
Schilling made a sizeable cash contribution to help start the
new Internet
Commerce Association, a non-profit organization
set up to defend he rights of all domain owners. If you are
looking for insight from someone who really knows what
they are talking about, you will find it at Seven Mile.
Frank
Schilling
Name Administration, Inc.
Posted March 16, 2007
Moniker.com
has released the results from the T.R.A.F.F.I.C.
West 2007Silent online domain auction that
concluded last night. 250 domains were sold for a total of $1,118,646.
Adding that to the $4.3 million worth of domains that
were sold during the Live Auction at T.R.A.F.F.I.C.
West on March 7 in Las Vegas brought the overall
total for the Live and Silent auctions to just under $5.5
million, eclipsing the previous record of $5.3 million
set at the T.R.A.F.F.I.C.
East Live and Silent auctions in Hollywood,
Florida last October (T.R.A.F.F.I.C. West figures
represent high bids and are subject to change until escrow is
completed for the domains won) . You can see all of the winning bids
placed in both the Live and Silent auctions at T.R.A.F.F.I.C.
West here.
Moniker will now try to set an even higher auction standard at
the T.R.A.F.F.I.C.
New York City conference coming up June 19-22
at the Grand Hyatt in Manhattan.
Posted March 15, 2007
Sedo.com
released a report yesterday on the market for Great
Britain's .co.uk domains. Using sales data compiled by Sedo
and DNJournal.com, the company said the total volume of
reported .co.uk sales shot up 153% in the year ending
Dec. 31, 2006. The growth rate for the previous year was 79%
so demand for the popular country code is obviously gaining
momentum. The average secondary market sales price for .co.uk
domains was £2,062 ($3,992 at today's exchange
rate). As you know if you follow our weekly domain
sales reports, Sedo is the dominant player in
country code sales. In 2006, a remarkable 84% of all
reported .co.uk sales were made through Sedo.co.uk.
More details from the Sedo
report are available here.
Posted March 14, 2007
You
may have already spotted this on the general news
wires, but it is such a big Internet story we wanted to make
sure you don't miss it. Media giant Viacom suedYouTube.com and the site's owner, Google,
Inc. for over $1 billion today for copyright
infringement. Viacom owns properties like MTV and has
grown tired of seeing YouTube make money from their material
(uploaded without authorization by YouTube users). This is
shaping up to be one of the biggest legal battles of the
Internet age and I have always thought that Google would have
a difficult time defending their position if
they faced this kind of suit. Just look what happened to Napster
in the music business after they were sued. Let's just hope
Google doesn't try to pay what will be a gargantuan legal bill
(win or lose) by lowering their PPC payouts for domain
traffic!
Posted March 13, 2007
The
debacle at Registerfly.com continues to spread to
mainstream news outlets around the world. This morning
BigNewsNetwork.com published a comprehensive
article on the registrar's woes (or more
accurately the woes of those who are unfortunate enough to be
Registerfly customers). In an article that is overflowing with shocking
information, two passages are particularly alarming: "RegisterFly remains open for business,
offering its services to new, unsuspecting customers. Despite its registration, renewal, and transfer systems all being dysfunctional, RegisterFly continues to take payments for orders it cannot
fulfill" and "at the very time ICANN was accrediting RegisterFly,
eNom (for whom Registerfly acted as a reseller) was contacted again and was told
its own accreditation was in potential breach as a result of allegations that its reseller RegisterFly was altering
customers Whois data and populating the Whois record with "intentionally inaccurate data."
You have to ask how on earth could ICANN accredit
Registerfly at the same time it was threatening Registerfly's upstream
service provider because of Registerfly's countless misdeeds!? As
the full extent of the damage done to domain owners and operators of online businesses becomes known,
ICANN is going to have a lot to answer for. This situation has
been - and continues to be - an utter disgrace to
everyone involved.
Posted March 12, 2007
Sedo
has announced plans to hold Second Annual SedoPro Partner
Forum at the Mohonk Resort in New Paltz, New
York June 17-19, 2007. The event at the mountain retreat
outside New York City will be staged immediately before the
T.R.A.F.F.I.C.
New York conference at the Grand Hyatt Hotel
in Manhattan June 19-22. Sedo said their invitational
event will include networking, interactive workshops, 1-on-1 counseling, and discussion with industry leaders on the future of the domain industry.
Sedo Co-Founder and CEO Tim Schumacher said “Simply throwing a party wouldn’t have been enough to show our appreciation for SedoPro customers, who are some of the most sophisticated and successful domain portfolio investors out
there." Sedo said the two-day event will also feature an unforgettable gala
with captivating views, gourmet meals and a series of workshops with experts on
topics such as trademark law, negotiation strategy and domain
monetization. The First SedoPro Partner Forum was held last year in
Maastrict, Holland and attracted over 110 domain industry professionals from 18 different
countries. More information about this year's event can be found at
SedoProPartnerForum.com.
Posted March 11, 2007
Several
companies coordinated news releases with this
week's T.R.A.F.F.I.C. conference in Las Vegas.
In one major announcement, NameMedia unveiled their new
ActiveExchange,
a platform that allows domain owners to have their names
listed for sale simultaneously at BuyDomains.com, Afternic.com
and more than 55 resellers in North America, the Asia-Pacific
region, Europe and the Middle East. The
service was previously reserved for names in the BuyDomains
portfolio. ActiveExchange also provides one-stop access
to NameMedia's three customized parking platforms; ActiveAudience,
GoldKey and SmartName. NameMedia Senior VP (and
General Manager of the company's marketplace businesses), Pete
Lamson said “ActiveExchange offers domain sellers
an unrivaled level of revenue generation, personalized service
and one-stop convenience. Our broad end-user reach, sales team
representation, comprehensive monetization tools and parking
solutions—all integrated onto one platform—is designed to
help customers achieve maximum value from their domain
names”.
Posted March 10, 2007
The
never ending saga of deeply troubled registrar Registerfly.com
has taken another surprise twist. After being ousted from the
company by two other board members, former CEO (and 50% owner)
Kevin Medina has been put back in charge by a New
Jersey judge. According to a story at BusinessWeek.com
today, "John Naruszewicz, one of the two who had
fired Medina and taken control of the company, doesn't plan to
appeal the judge's decision. "We lost and it's all
over," he says. "The company will implode in days
and 1 million domain names are going to be lost. It's a
damned shame." Current and former customers reacted with
shock on Web forums and e-mails: "This is very bad.
Registerfly will be shut down soon," predicts Justin
Kulhawick, a former customer who last year set up a Web
site, Registerflies.com,
to call attention to the company's failings." It remains
to be seen how ICANN will react to this latest
development and continuing questions about the fate of domains
owned by thousands of Registerfly customers.
Posted March 9, 2007
I'm
backfrom the
T.R.A.F.F.I.C.
West Conference in Las Vegas. My notebook
computer died Monday night, so I was unable to post the daily
show updates I had hoped to bring you in this section during
the week. I apologize for that unavoidable break in our daily
updates to The Lowdown. In a nutshell it was the largest
domain conference in history with more than 600
attendees at the luxurious Venetian Hotel. Moniker.com's
live auction Wednesday produced $4.3 million in sales
and more than two thirds of the names in the auction sold, doubling
the sales percentage from the last live T.R.A.F.F.I.C. auction
in October. You can see all of the final bids here.
Meanwhile the silent auction continues through March 14 and
that is expected to add another $1 million or so in sales. I'm
starting immediately on our complete show wrap up article
that we expect to publish on the home page Monday night
(March 12). It will be complemented by the best of the
more than 600 photos we took during the event to put you in
the middle of the action!
Posted March 9, 2007
Verisign
released their2007
Domain Name Industry Brief today and the company's
Senior Account Manager, Chris Sheridan, summed up the
extensive data in the report during a presentation at eNom's
Reseller Summit at the Venetian Hotel in Las
Vegas this morning (we are covering the eNom event as well
as the T.R.A.F.F.I.C.
West conference that follows this week at the
Venetian). Sheridan said the domain registration market is
enjoying tremendous growth. At the end of 2006 a record
120 million domain names were registered, a 32%
jump over the past year. Sheridan said much of that growth is
coming from ccTLDs. In fact in the fourth quarter of
2006, more than 4 million country code domains were
registered, the most ever in a single quarter. China's .cn
accounted for about 500,000 of those as internet use in
that country continues to explode. ccTLDs now account for 43.7
million domain registrations worldwide. Sheridan said
multi-lingual domain registrations (IDNs) are also
surging and have enjoyed an 89% growth rate year over
year. In another sign of a healthy market, Sheridan said
71% of domain names coming up for renewal for the first
time are being renewed. Growth in the popular .com and .net
extensions that Verisign operates has also been phenomenal. At
the end of 2004 there were 38 million registered .com/.net
domains. The number rose to 50 million by the end of 2005 and
swelled to 65 million at the end of 2006.
Posted
March 5, 2007
Domain
pioneer and T.R.A.F.F.I.C. Conference co-founder Rick Schwartz
was the subject of an interesting
article by Fred Marion in Florida's Palm
Beach Post Friday (March 2). Schwartz, who lives just down
the coast from Palm Beach in Boca Raton, colorfully
detailed the path he has followed from community college
drop-out to domain industry multi-millionaire. In his usual
straight to the point style, Schwartz explained how the domain
business works in a way that the man on the street can easily
understand. Schwartz is currently in Las Vegas
preparing to stage this week's sold out T.R.A.F.F.I.C.
West 2007 conference at the Venetian Hotel.
We are there as well and will bring you full coverage of the
event in our March Cover Story that is due out the evening of Monday,
March 12.
Posted
March 4, 2007
It
looks like ICANN's attempt to stop the flow of
blood at disintegrating registrar Registerfly.com is
headed to court. In an update
posted on the ICANN website yesterday, the organization that
oversees the domain name system said that it sent two
employees to Registerfly's New Jersey office February
27 to audit the firm and obtain registrant information, but
that Registerfly had not complied with ICANN's request
for information. On March 1 RegisterFly's
lawyers sent ICANN a letter
claiming that refusal to comply "should not be construed
as unwillingness to cooperate with ICANN but as evidence of
Registerfly's continuing efforts to service their customers."
ICANN responded with a March 2 letterdescribing the RegisterFly statement as "preposterous"
and setting out additional breaches of Registerfly's Registrar
Agreement with ICANN. ICANN has now served notice that it
will file a suit against RegisterFly in the United
States District Court for the Central District of
California seeking a temporary restraining order requiring
RegisterFly to turn over the data requested and to compel an
emergency audit of its books and records. ICANN also reached
an agreement with the various domain registries to prevent
domains registered at Registerfly that have entered Redemption
Grace Period from being deleted (and permanently lost to
their current owners) until the problems with Registerfly are
resolved. Meanwhile the clock is ticking on a threat
ICANN issued Feb. 21 to revoke Registerfly's accreditation
(and ability to sell domain registrations) within 15 days if
their long list of Registrar Agreement violations are not
corrected before the deadline.
Posted
March 3, 2007
The
.mobi registry has
announced a partnership with Akmin
Technologies to publish the .mobi Site Builder,
a tool to be made available exclusively to .mobi registrars
around the world. This is part of dotMobi's Go Mobile! global
program. The idea with the .mobi Site Builder is to help
consumers and small businesses develop simple, yet effective,
mobile web sites. The tool, based on Akmin's mobiSiteGalore
application will include high-end features that allow advanced
users to build customized sites. You can see an example of a
site built using the current version of the tool at http://pinky.mobi
(a site developed by .mobi's Director of New Markets, Pinky
Brand). .mobi is also making a small group of premium
domains available at Moniker.com's live auction March
7th at the T.R.A.F.F.I.C.
West conference in Las Vegas. That list
includes such gems as RealEstate.mobi, Pizza.mobi,
Casinos.mobi and Models.mobi. You can see
Moniker's complete auction list, including .mobi and all other
extensions, here.
Posted
March 2, 2007
Domain
conglomerate Name
Media has made another major acquisition.
We got word last night that the Waltham, Massachusetts
based company has just purchased PPC (pay per click)
domain monetization service SmartName.com.
SmartName's clients are to be informed of the acquisition in
an email today. Name Media has also decided to switch
SmartName's upstream service provider from Yahoo to Google,
a move they are also making with GoldKey.com, another
PPC provider the company acquired last year. Name Media also
operates a third PPC service, Active Audience, as well
as domain aftermarket venues BuyDomains and Afternic.
SmartName was founded by Ari Goldberger and Larry
Fischer who will continue to be actively involved in
management of the company. SmartName is a pioneer in the PPC
space and has been responsible for several innovations in the
field, a fact that resulted in the company being featured in
our April
2006 Cover Story.
Posted March 1, 2007
If
you've been out of the loop lately, catch up in the Lowdown
Archive!
We need your help to keep giving domainers The
Lowdown, so please email [email protected]with any interesting information you might have. If possible,
include the source of your information so we can check it out (for
example a URL if you read it in a forum or on a site
elsewhere).
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