Verisign (VRSN) has released their latest Q2/2007 DomainBrief. If I have a chance, I might publish some excerpts/highlights at a later time.

You always need to take a close look at your supplier’s terms and service. Especially if you are using their DNS, since some registrars will reserve the right to “park” the subdomains of your domains if you use their DNS.

From Dotster’s terms of service:

DNS Wildcard. In the event you utilize Dotster, Inc.’s DNS management services and fail to configure a wildcard DNS for your domain, Dotster, Inc. may insert wildcard DNS records to resolve subdomains of your domain that would not otherwise resolve. Dotster, Inc. may point those subdomains to a web page that may contain advertisements and other materials selected by Dotster, Inc. in Dotster, Inc.’s sole discretion. This may include, but is not limited to, third-party website, third-party product and service offerings, and/or Internet search engines.

So don’t be surprised when someone misstypes “ww.yourdomain.com” and sees advertising.

I’ve heard stories about GoDaddy doing similar things when you use their DNS, can anyone confirm? As far as I know they don’t even allow users to set a wildcard themselves. Plus, many registrars will default-park your newly registered domain of you are not using your own nameservers.

Oh and yes, then there’s your friendly hosting provider. Some of them are even so friendly that they will default to displaying ads on your error pages.

If you know of any other nice places that try to make money of your site/domain, please let us know in the comments.

[Update]: Just to add to this. Imagine you advertise your site via PPC. Someone types in ww.yourdomain.com and ends up on the registrar monetization page. Your ad is displayed, they click on it. The registrar makes money off you in order to get a visitor that is trying to get to your site.

[via NamePros]

As we already know GoDaddy will be taking over the RegisterFly names. It looks like they have now started contacting customers in order to let them know as of when they will be able to manage their names at RegisterFly – it seems like the user import will be completed next week.

It would be very interesting to know if ICANN and GoDaddy were able to recover the registration information from the domains using the RegisterFly whois-privacy service (which actually was also used by other registrars).

As mentioned before, Domainers do good deeds. Now that the person who pays for the next in line the supermarket has outed himself as Michael Gilmour, Tom came up with the idea to give someone a domain name. The problem remains the infrastructure (how to give the revenue of a name to a homeless person), but the idea is a great start. For domainers looking to give, MicroLoan sites like Kiva are also an opportunity to give back to the (global) community.

Chris Ambler, Chief Software Strategist at eNom (a division of Demand Media), has relaunched his blog. I am a subscriber now, and I am looking forward to reading more.

As we all knew Verisign went ahead and confirmed that they are planning to increase the registration cost for COM/NET domains by the maximum permitted amount of 7%. The new prices (which are paid by the registrars) go in effect on October 15th, 2007. The annual price for .COM registrations increase from $6.00 to $6.42 and .NET registrations will increase from $3.50 to $3.85. We can be sure that the majority of the registrars will pass them on to us.

As a little remedy (yeah right), ICANN has retroactively (from July 1st, 2006 onwards) lowered their ICANN fee to registrars (some registrars, such as GoDaddy, charge this fee separately for endusers) their fee from $0.25 to $0.22.

Meanwhile Jay from DomainTools lets us know that former ICANN Board Member Karl Auerbach told him that Verisign spends $0.14 on maintaining a domain name for a year. I guess their expenses are going to increase a lot, since infrastructure, bandwidth, hardware and storage are getter cheaper more expensive all the time. Oh the irony. But they are going to build us a much safer DNS infrastructure over the next 3 years, and they are going to need all of our money to do so. And then there was this item about increasing their own company value, so their shareholders are happy.

And yes, Jay is right. Verisign has yet to complain about the Domain Tasting and the load it puts on their servers. My guess is they make too much money from the kept names to care about it. And how come the .ORG registry PIR complained about it and was able to push through a resolution that allows them to charge for “excessive” deletions? My take would be that the “keep-rate” of tasted domains in the .ORG namespace is quite a bit lower than the rate for COM/NET domains.

In order to keep things safe, the US Department of Homeland security would also like to participate somehow. How about giving them the private key to the Root servers (thanks Tia), that make our domain names work. After all, how could we implement the new DNSSec without their help. And let’s not forget, that the US government still reserves the right to oversee ICANN/IANA.

Meanwhile ICANN is considering to seek immunity from US laws (thanks Tia). Maybe this is about tax laws? Lawsuits about Registerfly and the like? And what exactly is ICANN doing again, and who are they representing? Who is financing them again?

I’d go along with Frank Schilling here and say: Advance Renew your domains. The good ones, at least. You can save 7% erm, make that 6.5% now (with the ICANN fee being 3 cents lower).

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.

For those of you not attending traffic, you can listen to the auction on Webmasterradio.FM. Moniker is also posting the results on their website or on XR.com, courtesy of Richard Lau and DomainManager.com. Richard’s list also includes the passed names.

According to an interview with Dr. Klaus Herzig of the DENIC (German Registry operator) published by DomainConsult, the registry is planning to introduce authorization codes for transfers by the end of the year. The details have not been defined yet. DENIC is set up similar to a cooperative, where all registrars together form the registry. In the past, the time it took to reach consensus between members has sometimes slowed down an implementation of new features.

Generally .DE registrars will require fax from the registrant in order to approve an incoming/outgoing transfer. So in some cases the gaining registrar will just initiate a transfer and not verify the authorization of the person ordering the transfer. Some losing registrars do not require the fax in order to accept an outgoing transfer. In the past, this has lead to domain hijackings of such high-profile domains as google.de and ebay.de . In both cases, DENIC was able to resolve the problem.

[via DomainConsult]

The parking company Hotkeys (that is known to occasionally email owners of domains directly, asking them to park their names with them), apparently is a part of Demand Media now, according to this Job Posting for a Business Development Manager, we found on Craiglist.

Hotkeys Internet Group is part of Demand Media, a newly formed company backed with a $220mm in capital from top tier investors.

[via Google]