The German .DE ccTLD passed an important milestone yesterday - the registry processed the ten millionth registration. DE is the second biggest TLD on the Internet, right after .COM.

The .DE ccTLD is operated by DENIC, a corporation that is jointly formed by all accredited .DE registrars. The majority of registrations are still processed via an asynchronous email interface today, DENIC has recently introduced a real time registration interface.

[Press Release]

Fabulous Domains/Dark Blue Sea (DKBLY) announced today that Go Daddy will also list their domains on their aftermarket website. Despite the press release I was not able to locate any Fabulous Domains in the TDNAM listings. I was able to locate domains owned by Name Media in the listings though - as they had announced a partnership with TNAM in December 2005.

[Press Release]

Just in case you are wondering, I am importing some of the older articles from my personal blog into DomainEditorial.com.

ICANN has announced a workshop on the Domain Name Marketplace for tomorrow at the ICANN meeting in Marrakech/Morocco. You are invited to comment.

The following topics will be covered:

• Introduction
• Life Cycle of a Domain Name
• History & Evolution of the domain name marketplace
• Monetization
• Add-Grace
• Expiring Names Practices
• Long-Tail Proposal
• ICANN Policy Implications

The listed paricipants are:

• Jothan Frakes, Executive Producer, Domain Roundtable Conference
• Tim Cole, Chief Registrar Liaison, ICANN
• John Berryhill, Intellectual Property Attorney
• Josh Meyers, GM, Yahoo! Search Marketing
• Roberto Gaetano, ALAC Board Liaison
• Sarah Deutsch, VP & Associate General Counsel, Verizon Communications
• Tim Ruiz, VP Corporate Development & Policy Planning, Go Daddy
• Rob Hall, CEO, Momentous/Pool
• David Maher, Senior VP - Law & Policy, Public Interest Registry (.ORG)
• Jonathon Nevett, VP and Chief Policy Counsel, Network Solutions
• Pat Kane, Director, Business Operations and Policy, VeriSign
• Paul Stahura, CEO, Demand Media/eNom
• Bruce Tonkin, Chair, GNSO Council

Judging from the topics covered and the participants, this is going to be an interesting workshop. For those not attending, you might be able to listen in/participate remotely. Most likely there will be no earth shattering decisions made here, but this workshop is one of the first steps in laying the groundwork for how ICANN views the domainer industry.

One item in the agenda seems of a special interest to most domainers: Paul Stahura’s Long-Tail Proposal. Probably this is an improved version of his whitepaper as posted on the registrar and GNSO mailinglists. The whitepaper tries to address the problem of the added system load due to traffic testing. The suggestion is to add additional registration types (referred to as Cred types in the proposal) at a lower fee. Both types are basically an option on the name, since the name remains available for traditional registrations at any time.
Type 1 would allow the registrant to take register a domain, for a price far below the current price of the $6 dollar registry fee (”near $0.00“). The domains would all point at a central server, and the revenue generated by this name would be passed on to the registrar, who can share it with the registrant. In order to limit abuse, the suggestion is to actually charge $6 at the time of registration, which would be credited back to the registrar if the domain is deleted or converted to another registration type. The name would remain available to traditional registrations (and the registrar would be refunded the amount paid for the name if the name is registered by another party).
Type 2 would allow the registrant to use their own nameservers for the registration, at a lower fee (suggestion is $2.00 plus ICANN fee) than the current registry fee. There would be no add-grace period that allows for a full refund of the registration fee.  The name would be fully manageable, but the registration basically is only an option on the name, since the name basically remains available for normal registration at any time.

Type 3 are the normal registrations as they exist now with the only change that at least 90% of a registrar’s registrations need to be kept.

The extensive whitepaper also contains additional details and a FAQ.

Domainers will be getting together in Barcelona Spain from July 25th to July 27, 2006. The details and further information will be published at http://www.domainermeeting.eu/ .

There have been many recent public comments that consider all domainers cybersquatters. I have been meaning to comment on that - as you might imagine I do not quite agree. But here’s an article, where I could not hold off commenting on - this time against whois privacy.

On CNET the lawyer Doug Isenberg tells us that ICANN needs to clamp down on domain name abuse. Of course he also had to use the “Cybersquatter” word: Today, cybersquatters have rebranded themselves as “domainers.” Mr. Isenberg also is a panelist for WIPO.

Some rumors and public data lead me to believe, that the author of the article, Doug Isenberg, is also the owner of the domain “couponcodes.com”. So let’s take a closer look: On DomainTools.com, we found an old whois record showing the following owner (from March 2006):

DOLESCO LLC
5310 South Trimble Road
ATLANTA, Georgia 30342
United States

Registered through: GoDaddy.com
Domain Name: COUPONCODES.COM
Created on: 06-Dec-99
Expires on: 06-Dec-07
Last Updated on: 16-Jan-05

Administrative Contact:LLC, DOLESCO doug@isenberg.net
5310 South Trimble Road
ATLANTA, Georgia 30342
United States
404 256 4334 Fax –

Alexa also lists him as the owner of the site, if you seach for his main site, GigaLaw.com:

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/?url=Gigalaw.com

Today the whois of this domain is protected with Whois Privacy, which he also mentions in his article: http://www.iwhois.com/couponcodes.com

Also “couponcodes.com” seems confusingly similar to “couponcode.com“, which also is a registered trademark:

The domain currently is serving ads from SiteLauncher.

Whois privacy also helps to protect site owners from receiving spam, so of course this is a double-edged sword. If there is a valid legal complaint, any registrar will lift the whois privacy veil, so I do not really see the big problem here.

[via CNET/News.com / DomainNameWire]

iREIT has announced a partnership with weather.com for their Netster portal. I would be interested in knowing if they are planning to include this information on some of their other domains as well. The integration for the Netster.com site appears to be completed.

According to this press release, Oversee.net (which also owns DomainSponsor.com), has purchases a privately held portfolio of 35,000 names and is planning to purchase additional portfolios.

Oversee.net monetizes more than one million domain names and has more than 100 million unique visitors per month. [...] Because DomainSponsor has a close relationship with the domainer community, Oversee has a unique ability to quickly execute potential acquisitions.

A while ago Siteparker released data from January 1, 2006 through March 31, 2006 contains visits, impressions, clicks and related data for a sample set of
15,000 domains that in aggregate have in excess of 1,000,000
views per month.

Data contained in the report:

• Page Views Per Unique User: 1.3
• Unique Users Who Clicked: 11.77%
• Average Clicks per Unique User Who Clicked: 1.68
• Average Clicks per Total Users: .1981
• Average Page Advertisement Response: 15.22%
• Repeat User Traffic
• Repeat Click Traffic
• Repeat Click per View Traffic
• Number of Clicks per Position
  

Siteparker Q1 2006 Traffic Analysis (PDF)

(link corrected)

After BuyDomains/NameMedia’s partnership with DomainCapital, Sedo announced a partnership with DomainCapital today for domain purchases over $10,000 USD.

Sedo’s financing program is currently designed for domain name purchases of $10,000 or more. Through the first five months of 2006, Sedo brokered 211 such transactions.

[Thank you Sally]