Elliot Noss, CEO of Tucows (my former employer), posted some guidelines as to how to pick a registrar. In conjunction with the Registerfly disaster, those are good questions, everyone should ask. And especially if you are a commercial (larger scale) registrant, you should keep in mind that your domains are your assets, so you might have to spend some money to protect them.

Here’s his list in short, for full explanations, see the Tucows Blog:

1. What is your primary business model?
2. Do you make transfers as easy as the rules allow?
3. Do you allow for easy locking/unlocking?
4. Do you make it easy to opt-out of auto-renewals?
5. Do you tie domains to your services?
6. Do you offer Whois privacy? What are your privacy policies in general?
7. What are your policies on compliance issues like litigation, ownership disputes and WDRP?
8. How easy is it to contact you?
9. What happens when my domain expires?
10. Are you a registrar or reseller?

I would like to add two more items that are mostly related to security and the ease of management of your domains that especially matter the more domains you hold.

11. How easy is it to manage your domains in bulk (i.e. bulk contact/DNS changes, bulk locking/unlocking, retrieving the authorization code).

12. Is there any additional security functionality to protect your domains?

In any case, I would recommend every domainer or large scale registrant to also consider becoming ICANN accredited. Having your own registrar can provided additional protection. Maybe even your current registrar can offer you services and help in becoming an registrar and migrating your domains to your own “tag”.

If you are not reading this blog via a feedreader, you might have noticed that it was offline the last couple of days. It’s back now, but the server only has one active hard drive instead of the usual two. This means that I’ll try my best to move this blog off this server and onto the new one which has been ready for several months already. Also I think I might not go the the original planned route and run several blogs of a Wordpress MU installation, but rather modify Wordpress to use different configuration files based on the domain name of the blog.

Oversee.net’s DomainSponsor has just announced DomainFest Amsterdam 2007, which is going to take place from May 16th to May 17th in the beautiful city of Amsterdam in the Netherlands.

Also the website was updated to include videos and photos from previous DomainFest events, including Ron Sheridan’s interview with Frank Schilling which was shown at DomainFest Global 2007 in LA.

Until about two or three months ago I would have said that I don’t care about .mobi at all and that the main reason I bought some of them was for resale. Well, I probably still wouldn’t buy any new .mobi’s today, but I have to admit that I am impressed with the marketing approach the registry is taking.

The registry is currently targeting media companies, hosting companies, resellers and developers, because by bringing content to .mobi, they will bring traffic to it. It’s a good approach and it seems to be working better than I expected.

Initially I wrongfully assumed that the approach was to gain power simply through the cellphone and search companies that are part of the project - but most of them probably joined mainly because their competitors did.

I was thinking that without a .mobi button on the cellphones, little or nothing would happen. But of course building active sites that work on mobile phones is a good approach. And while a .com site can tell if there’s a mobile phone “looking” at and, and change it’s design accordingly (see google.com on a cell phone), not all sites will be changing to provide this option. So while in the long run cellphones and websites will work better together under all TLDs, there might be a chance for the registry and early adopters to brand .mobi as the TLD that will work on your cellphone.

The Polish registry, NASK, has announced new registration rules for the TLD .PL as of March 18th, and is currently asking registrars to send notices to the registrants. Please make sure to confirm the email from your registrar, since you might otherwise risk losing your .PL domain.

The .BE registry, DNS.BE, which mostly grew by offering free .BE registrations for a limited time has changed their terms and conditions as well (back on February 14th). You should pay particular attention to the section about domain disputes - basically the person who loses the domain has to pay 50% of the fee for the dispute process, thus lowering the cost for the complainant. Read the new rules here (pay special attention to #10, 3 k).

This blog and some other sites on the same server have experienced some problems over the last weekend. I apologize for the inconvenience that this may have caused to anyone, but everything should be back to normal now - and get better in the coming weeks as the sites are being moved to a new server.

While most companies in this space are looking to expand their sales channels, Pool.com just announced that they are ending their affiliate program as of May 1st, 2007. Pool.com operates a drop name snapping service, domain tasting as well as a domain market place. The company is part of the Canadian Momentous group.

[via eMail]

Sahar’s got the summary:

The lesson here is very simple; do not start using a web address for a site if you do not own the .com counterpart. It is going to cost you. 

Everybody has a hidden agenda, everybody wants in on the lucrative domain name industry, especially with more and more advertising money moving online. While this post is pure speculation and without any proof, some of the following observations just seem obvious:

• VeriSign and ICANN are justifying the upcoming price increases for domain name registrations with the recent denial of service attacks against the root nameservers. While those attacks do mean increase infrastructure cost, let’s not forget the the cost of hardware, software and bandwidth is still going down.
• WIPO would like to let everyone to know that there’s a reason for their existence. And they would also like companies to know that there are evil Cybersquatters out there. The amount of increasing domain disputes can probably mostly be attributed to more public awareness of the issue at hand - of course this also helps some companies to go and try to get good generic domains from legitimate owners. And let’s not forget that lawyers benefit from an increased amount of disputes.
• The UN thinks this is a great opportunity they would like to seize in order to emphasize that the control of the doman name space should be taken away from ICANN. I doubt that this would speed up any of the slow progress we are seeing now.
• Microsoft is using the same topic in order to fight Google and Yahoo. Many people have been wondering why Microsoft hasn’t entered the domain space with their adCenter product. Yesterday in a conversation with Peter, he came up with the answer: There is more money in having more non-resolving domain names for them, especially if all typos and trademarks would be “outlawed”, hence the Strider Typo-Patrol project. The default search from Internet Explorer, which kicks in by default if you enter a non-existent or non-working website, would capture way more of the user’s typos and allow them (and some ISPs) to monetize this traffic.
• For Google and Yahoo large parts of their revenue are dependent on the domain channel. Without it, they probably would not have enough traffic inventory to satisfy the needs of their advertisers. As much as they would like this traffic to come directly to them, the users just don’t want to change their behaviour.

As for my hidden agenda, I’ll let you know what it is when I find out.

Ron Jackson posted his TRAFFIC West 2007 wrap-up at DNJournal, as always, a must read - especially for the ones who missed most of the sessions like me.