Network Solutions, the former COM/NET/ORG monopoly registrar, has been aquired by General Atlantic, a private equity firm. Rumour has it was a $800 million deal.

I wonder if  the purchase price has anything to do with some of the high-value names still registered there.

[via TechCrunch | Press Release]

ICANN approved that application for the creation of a .ASIA TLD. No big surprises here, after .EU had been approved before.

[ICANN Board Meeting]

From NameWinner.com:

We are pleased to announce that domain names previously available for bidding on NameWinner are now available on SnapNames.com. We have partnered with SnapNames to auction Dotster’s expiring domains. This change allows us to focus our efforts on building the best domain monetization system for our customers.

So Dotster’s names will now also be listed at SnapNames. They are also going to be releasing a new version of their RevenueDirect parking system within the coming days.

Owen Borseth of Domainsite @ IDNForums:

First, the issue is not related to any kind of hardware failure, system failure, or data loss. The reason the domain names were deleted was due to employee error and only affected a limited number of domain names registered on 2006-08-29 or 2006-08-30, depending on your time zone. The affected registrars were Spot Domain LLC, Name.com LLC, and Name.net LLC. 225 domains got deleted and 216 have been restored to date. There are 9 domains that we have not been able to get back.

The 9 names they were not able to get back will probably have been reregistered by other registrants in the mean time. Deletions within the 5 day window after registration do not result in the domain going into the redemption grace period, but the domain is deleted instantly instead.

Peter comments on Sedo’s press release (and also compares it to .INFO):

The .EU registry is riding on the tails of a massive educational and political campaign by most if not all EU members, which was designed to acquire buy-in from the population for the consolidation of the Union in the first place. Add this to the fact that the European market has been competing to catch up with North America on the Internet for a long time and you see how there would be a jump on this bandwagon of an EU based domain space that’s meaningful to all yet also transcends any language barrier.

For me the success has largely been a surprise, and I cannot shake the feeling that most of the names have been registered mostly by speculators, who are now selling their names to other speculators. But hopefully I am wrong. We’ll see when the first big .EU website launches.
After all it would be nice if European countries felt more positively about the European Union than in the past and identified themselves with the EU as a whole…

[via ClickToHit]

As Domain Name Wire noted, GoDaddy appears to have discontinued their TDNAM Premium Auctions, which were only available for bidding to members paying the highest Cash Parking Rate (Cash Parking is GoDaddy’s domain parking program where your pay decides the amount of revenue share you receive). DomainEditorial has received a copy of an email from TDNAM support confirming Domain Name Wire’s observation.
Also Bulk Register (which was purchased by eNom a month ago) announced via email that they are discontinuing their DropGuild service, which showed traffic stats for expiring domains and allowed users to bid on those names.

eNom, Inc. (www.enom.com), announced that it has completed the purchase of the business and operations of BulkRegister LLC. (www.bulkregister.com). Already one of the largest registrars in the world in terms of domain names under management, the addition of BulkRegister(R) gives eNom(R) an additional 1.5 million domain names, and 35,000 bulk membership customers. With more than 6.8 million domain names on its platform, the combined company is now the second-largest registrar in the world, surpassing Network Solutions(R), according to Name Intelligence(R) (www.nameintelligence.com).

In 2006, eNom’s parent company, eNom Ventures, Inc., was acquired by Demand Media, Inc. The purchase of BulkRegister further expands the size and capabilities of Demand Media’s new media platform. In addition to eNom, Demand Media owns hundreds of thousands of domains and niche content websites, including eHow.com.

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]

If you are planning on going public it’s a great idea to get mentioned in the media as often as possible. Especially if you are “the good guy”. Hence Bob Parson brought up his newly invented term for an old practice once more, but this time in front of a different audience – As a feature article in Business Week Online: Getting the Drop on Domain-Name Abuse.

Basically the article is a reprise of his blog post. Once again, he does provide numbers, but he does not provide any statistics or more detailed information on the registrars that he accuses of registering and deleting the same names continuously within the grace period. As far as we could tell in our research, names do indeed often get tested multiple times in a row. But this testing occurs via different registrars and different corporate entities.

The article seems to attract the usual crowd, the GoDaddy supporters and the critics exposing some of the stains on GoDaddy’s clean sheet: Starting with information on how GoDaddy defaults all domain registrations to domain parking and ending with comments on how GoDaddy auctions names that are potential trademark infringements.

If all of this traffic testing really puts such a huge load on the registries, you can only wonder why ICANN and the registries have allowed this practise to continue for so long. The answer probably is (as so often): Money! The registry and ICANN earn money off every domain name kept. $0.25 annual ICANN fee and $6.00 annual registration fee for Verisign for any .COM name kept. So the cost to allow this testing only increases as the “keep rate” of the tested domains goes lower and lower. I would imagine that this rate is probably below 0.5% now and dropping. Any of the testing registrars care to comment?

GoDaddy’s Bob Parson even invents a new term for traffic testing: Domain Kiting. Here’s a brief summary of the coverage:

• Bob Parsons: 35 million names registered in April. 32 million were part of a kiting scheme. A serious problem gets worse.
• In Bad Taste by John Levine
• How Kiters and Snappers Suck the Air Out of ICANN (email battles)

The main focus of the public concern is linking traffic testing to the price increase proposed in the settlement agreement between ICANN and Verisign.

Bob Parsons: 

Here’s why I chose to call it domain kiting. All of us are familiar with the illegal practice of check kiting. Quite simply check kiting involves taking advantage of timing and the banking system to generate cash that simply isn’t there. In many ways that is what domain kiting does. Domain kiting takes advantage of timing and the domain name system in an abusive and improper way to generate cash. 

There is one difference. The registrars that participate in this testing do have to float the amount of money needed to cover the registrations at the registry. While they do receive a refund for the names that are deleted within the 5 day grace period, the money is under the registry’s control. (He does mention this in this article, but I would like to underline the point that the money is under the registry’s control at this point.)
Bob Parsons

After a domain name is registered, a registrar has five days to cancel a domain name registration – i.e. drop the name – and get their money back. Domain kiting registrars abuse this rule and cancel the lion’s share of the names they register just before the five day period expires – so they get their money back. But then something unexpected happens. After names are cancelled or dropped, the domain kiting registrar goes out and immediately registers the same names again. The domain kiting registrar will then put the same simple Web site back up for each domain name, wait another five days and then cancel all the names again — just in time to get a full refund.

By doing this, the registrars do in a way put the money on the line, since it is held by the registry. Obviously this is more than the usual everyday traffic testing.

I imagine that this debate has not yet ended.

Let’s end this with a quote from Karl Auerbach:

As we see from the numbers, the actual cost (ed. per domain name registration) to Verisign is about $0.02 or less.  That does not seem to warrant the $7, or 35000% profit, that ICANN is allowing Verisign to charge.