Be Interviewed on DomainSherpa
Every Friday, DomainSherpa.com provides you with a hand-selected, editorially-based review of the weekly news. In this summary, you will find the latest articles and videos produced by DomainSherpa staff and contributors. You will also find links to the best news articles in the domain name industry – so you don’t have to spend your time searching for news or reading something that was not worth your time.
This Week’s News in Review
Domain Name Search is Much Improved (At Some Registrars) – 21-Aug-14
A look at how major domain registrars are handling domain search in the wake of new TLDs. I’ve written a couple times about the state of registrar search as registrars grapple with an onslaught of new TLDs, most recently at the end of February. There’s good news for TLD registries: search is getting a lot…
Beiersdorf AG, Hamburg, Germany Guilty of Reverse Domain Name Hijacking – 21-Aug-14
Beiersdorf AG, which is located in Hamburg, Germany has just been found guilty of Reverse Domain Name Hijacking (RDNH) on the domain name BeiersdorfChina.com They were represented by in-house counsel In this case the Respondent is Beiersdorf (Tianjin) Petrochemical Co., Ltd., which is located in Tianjin, China. The decision was issued in Chinese and I…
Straat-backed Bidder Beats Donuts and Afilias to .health – 21-Aug-14
DotHealth has won the four-way contention set for the controversial new gTLD .health. Afilias and Donuts both withdrew their competing applications this week. Famous Four withdrew its application over a month ago. DotHealth is backed by Straat Investments, the investment vehicle chaired by .CO Internet’s Juan Calle. The new gTLD will run on a Neustar…
.cash and .fund Each Get Fewer Than 1,000 Registrations – 21-Aug-14
Slow start for the two new TLDs that launched yesterday (for which we have data.) Five top level domain names launched yesterday. Unfortunately, ICANN’s centralized zone file system only has updated zone files for two of them. .Cash gained 725 registrations to end the day with 909 in the zone file. .Fund picked up just…
Biggest Dot-brand? .realtor to Give Away Half a Million Domains – 21-Aug-14
Up to 500,000 card-carrying members of North American real estate associations will be given a free one-year .realtor domains, according to the registry. The National Association of Realtors said its members and members of the Canadian Real Estate Association will be able to claim their names at claim.realtor. The offer will become active October 23…
ANA: “Hard to Imagine That Most of The Already-launched TLDs Will Be Around in 2 Years – 21-Aug-14
The Association of National Advertisers (ANA) an opponent of the new gTLD program wrote a post on its corporate blog today asking “Already Launched New gTLD’s : Is Anyone Out There?” The post is a “report” written by their general counsel Reed Smith LLP, and Brad R. Newberg of the firm wrote the piece which…
How Many Domain Investors are There? Justdropped Newsletter Hits 100k Subscribers – 21-Aug-14
We have often wondered just how many people are domainers or domain investors, well today the deleted domain names data provider Justdropped.com announced today that it has reached 100,000 subscribers to it popular domain name newsletter. “The newsletter which offers high quality domain names at low reseller prices is published daily.” The newsletter has been…
.xyz Claims Its The Most Used New gTLD Extension – 20-Aug-14
In a blog post Daniel Negari the CEO of the .XYZ registry claims that .XYZ its the most used new gTLD extension. The post uses the numbers furnished by ntldstats.com that we disclosed in our post the other day that looks at the percentage of registered new gTLD domain names that are parked by extension. “”Let’s…
After Slamming The ccNSO, India Joins It – 20-Aug-14
India has become the newest member of ICANN’s country-code Supporting Organization, the ccNSO, just one month after the local registry slammed the group for not representing its interests. The National Internet Exchange (NIXI), which runs .in, became the 152nd ccNSO member yesterday, according to a note on its website. I haven’t reported on the first…
Registry Launches “Chinese Domain Ambassador Program” – 20-Aug-14
Registry engages with customers with ambassador program. Here’s another example of a registry reaching out directly to its registrants to help promote their new top level domain name. TLD Registry, the company behind Dot Chinese Online (.在线) and Dot Chinese Website (.中�-���’), has launched a its Chinese Domain Ambassador Program. The company noticed a group…
ICANN Names 4 Initial Members of Accountability & Governance Public Experts Group – 20-Aug-14
ICANN has named the first four members of the Accountability & Governance Public Experts Group. ICANN’s President and CEO, Fadi Chehadé, will be responsible for the selection of up to seven Advisers to sit on the Coordination Group to assure that best practices are brought from the larger global community. Once selected by the Public…
Reverse Domain Name Hijacking Ruling Over SaintLazarusUSA.com – 20-Aug-14
WIPO panelist hands down RDNH ruling. Every once in a while I read a UDRP involving organizations in a world I simply didn’t know existed. Such is the case in The American Association of the Order of St. Lazarus, Inc. v. Thierry Villejust over the domain name SaintLazarusUSA.com. The complainant was found guilty of reverse…
Be Warned: WIPO Taking Screenshots When a UDRP is Filed & Giving It to Panel & Why Its a Problem – 20-Aug-14
WIPO has been taking Screenshots of whatever is on a domain name as soon as a UDRP Is filed and they have been furnishing the screenshot to the UDRP panel who has been taking the screenshot into account as evidence in making their determination. This revelation came to light by John Berryhill who read the…
Tech Publications in China Giving Postive Coverage to .xyz – 20-Aug-14
Techweb.com.cn, gave a pretty good endorsement to the .XYZ registry. We had to use Google Translate to turn this into broken English but you get the general idea, that they are recommending to their readers they try .XYZ as an investment: 2014 has been in the past half more, this time in the domain name…
.cash & .tax Launch Today Here are The Registered Domain Names – 20-Aug-14
We have chatted earlier this week about the new domain names registered in two of the 5 new gTLD’s going live today, .Fund and .Investments and thought we would let you know what domain names were not going to be available when General Registration opens today for .Cash and .Tax. We think .Tax is going…
Ask.com Buys Ask.fm – 20-Aug-14
According to a story in the NewYorkTimes.com, Ask.com has acquired Ask.Fm. The deal was announced last week by IAC/InterActiveCorp, the owners of Ask.com Ask.Fm is not just a domain name, but a popular site 180 million regular monthly users . Forty percent of Ask.fm’s users are younger than 18, according to Doug Leeds, chief executive…
INTA Issues 6 Month Bulletin On Results of URS Cases – 20-Aug-14
The International Trademark Association (INTA) issued what it called a 6 month Bulletin on the results of cases filed under the Uniform Rapid Suspension (URS) procedure. INTA says that a total of 92 URS cases have been filed to date 88 with the National Arbitration Forum in the United States (NAF) and four with the…
420k ICANN Collision New gTLD Domains Start The Process of Being Freed As They are “Registered” – 19-Aug-14
There are a ton of new gTLD’s being “registered” today. Many readers have written and commented about the volume of domain “registered” today and that these registrations may screw up the new gTLD stats when the zone files update tomorrow. However the vast majority are domain names on the ICANN Collision list and appears to…
.club Registry Gets Some Love From The South Florida Business Journal – 19-Aug-14
The .Club registry got some love from the South Florida Business Journal today. “The Fort Lauderdale-based domain .club is leading a pack of newly established alternatives to the familiar .com, .net and .org. Users have registered more than 96,000 .club websites, outranking all but two of 361 new “top-level” domains launched this year to create…
Registrant of 4,000+ .email Domain Names Faces Mounting Legal Problems – 19-Aug-14
Yoyo.email claims it registered trademark-matching .email domain names for a legitimate fair use. Most National Arbitration Forum panels have disagreed. You’ve probably never heard of Yoyo.email before, but it is one of the biggest individual registrants of new top level domain names in a single TLD. The company registered over 4,000 .email domain names. The…
Are Industry-specific Resellers The Future of Domain Name Registration? – 19-Aug-14
Niche resellers and registrars are key for selling industry-specific domain names. Many of the new top level domain names coming to market are targeted to particular industries: .photography for photographers, .plumbing for plumbers, .solar for the solar industry. Selling these domain names through mass market domain name registrars is tricky. The domain names are unlikely…
.investments Launches Today Here are The Domains Taken in Sunrise & Eap – 19-Aug-14
The new gTLD .investments goes into general availability today meaning it can be registered on a first come first serve basis. Here are the more interesting domain names registered in Sunrise for trademark holders and in the Early Access Program for a higher one time fee. Either way these domain names are no longer available:…
.london Gets Over 600 Trademark New gTLD Registrations Here are The Most Interesting – 19-Aug-14
.London just updated its Zone file today and is reporting over 600 new gTLD registrations which all seem to be domain names registered in Sunrise for trademark holders. Some interesting no shows include a lot of US tech companies like Apple, Facebook and Twitter just to name a few. BuyDomains.London was not applied for buy…
17 Year Old Tvs.com Saved in UDRP Against $4 Billion Company That’s Going Into Domain Hall of Shame – 18-Aug-14
TV Sundram Iyengar and Sons Limited of Madurai of India represented by DePenning & DePenning, just lost its attempt to grab the 17 year old domain name TVS.com The domain owner P.A. Gordon was represented by ESQwire.com which won its second UDRP of the day, Congrats to Ari and Jason. The panel had a very…
Porsche Loses Porsche.social URS to Planned Fan Site – 18-Aug-14
Porsche.social is just a parked page, but its owners claim to be creating a free site for Porsche enthusiasts. Car company Porsche has lost a Uniform Rapid Suspension cybersquatting case it brought against the San Jose, California owner of Porsche.social. Interactiv Corporation told the URS panel that it plans to use the domain name for…
To Highlight Typo’s Bathrooms.com Registers Bathroomsweets.com: Price £80,000 (9.4 Million Calories) – 18-Aug-14
We just received a pretty amusing email from Bathrooms.com and its all about typo’s. In this case “to highlight Brits mistakenly misspelling and searching for ‘bathroom sweets’ instead of ‘bathroom suites’, Bathrooms.com have partnered with Choccywoccydoodah to sell the world’s most indulgent bathroom, a life-size, 100% Belgian chocolate bathroom suite on BathroomSweets.com.” “Online shoppers looking…
Vertical Axis Beats Back UDRP On Ritchey.com – 18-Aug-14
Vertical Axis Inc. represented by Ari and Jason at ESQwire.com, just beat back a UDRP on the domain name Ritchey.com The complaint was brought by Ritchey Design, Inc. of Nevada which is a “company specializing in bicycle components established in 1974 which has registrations for RITCHEY in the US, Canada and the European Community for…
Leading This Weeks New gTLD’s .fund, Here are The Taken Domains – 18-Aug-14
According to ntldstats.com, .Fund is leading the other new gTLD’s that go launch into general availability on Wednesday which includes .investments, .Cash and.Tax in terms of domain registrations through Sunrise and EAP Here are some of the more interesting .Fund registrations taken in the Sunrise period by trademark holders and through the Early Access Program…
Panel Slaps ICANN in .africa Case – 18-Aug-14
A panel of arbitrators had some stern words for ICANN as it handed controversial .africa gTLD applicant DotConnectAfrica another win in its Independent Review Process case. In a 33-page procedural ruling (pdf) published by ICANN late Friday, the IRP panel disagreed with ICANN’s lawyers on almost every argument they made, siding with DCA instead. The…
New TLDs This Week: .bio, .haus and an Expensive Donuts Domain – 18-Aug-14
StartingDot and Rightside join Donuts with new top level domain name releases this week. Last week was a Donuts-only week for new TLDs. This week the mega-registry is joined by Rightside and StartingDot. On Wednesday, Rightside will launch .haus. That’s German for “house”. Expect to pay anywhere from $25-$40 for .haus domains. Also on Wednesday,…
NTLDstats: 80% of All New gTLD’s are Parked & Has Stats for Each Extension; .buzz Has The Least – 18-Aug-14
ntldstats.com, has added parking stats to its system, both overall and by each new gTLD extension. Overall ntldstats says that just over 80% of all new gTLD domain names are parked. Last week Verisign announced as of June 29th only 3% of all new gTLD resolved to “business websites” which I assume by definition excludes…
New gTLD Registries Increasingly Attacking .com – 18-Aug-14
Is .com “silly” and “meaningless”? That’s what some new gTLD registries would have you believe. In separate blog posts over the last week, Donuts and ARI Registry Services have gone on the offensive, dismissing .com as an irrelevant relic of a bygone age. ARI CEO Adrian Kinderis branded .com as “meaningless and unintuitive” in a…
Governments to Get More Power at ICANN – 18-Aug-14
Governments are to get more power to influence ICANN’s board of directors. Under a proposal launched late Friday, ICANN plans to make it harder for the board to reject the often-controversial advice of the Governmental Advisory Committee. Today, the board is able to reject GAC advice with a simple majority vote, which triggers a consultation…
ICANN Offers Fix for Domain Name Collisions – 17-Aug-14
The flood of new top-level domain names, such as .club, .luxury, and .pic, confuse some web browsers when they conflict with old domain names. ICANN has created a way to detect these problems inside your network.
IRP Panel’s Declaration of The IRP Procedure in The Case of Dotconnect Africa Trust Vs ICANN – 16-Aug-14
IRP Panel’s Declaration of the IRP Procedure was released on August 14, dealing with the matter between DotConnectAfrica Trust (DCA) and ICANN. In June of 2013 ICANN decided not to accept the application from DCA with regards to the .Africa extension. Over the last year the two sides have been battling it out back and…
4chan Loses Domain Name Dispute With Oversee.net – 15-Aug-14
4chan wanted to get the domain name 4chan.com. Popular bulletin board site 4chan has lost a case it filed to get the domain name 4chan.com. 4chan, LLC, which operates the top 1,000 site 4chan.org, filed the complaint with World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) against Oversee.net back in March. One commenter on my original story about…
Big Changes to Traffic & Awards: Escrow.com to Count Votes & Rick Schwartz Last Show Produced? – 15-Aug-14
Some big changes are coming to the TRAFFIC domain name conference and the TRAFFIC awards. The TRAFFIC awards for 2014 will be handed out during TRAFFIC’s 10th anniversary conference that will be held October 30th- November 2nd in Miami Beach. Over the years I have been fortunate enough to win 4 TRAFFIC awards and have…
EasyDNS Changes Take-down Policy After Man Dies – 15-Aug-14
Canadian registrar EasyDNS has amended its take-down policy after a customer of one of its registrants died of an overdose. In a frank blog post today, CEO Mark Jeftovic said that the man had died using a “controlled substance” ordered online. The web site in question used a domain registered via EasyDNS. As a result…
Reported Mass Exodus From .com Explained – 15-Aug-14
Did Verisign suffer from a massive 2,600% increase in the number of deleted .com domain names this April? Not quite, although the bizarre spike in deletes may have highlighted an area where the company was previously out of compliance with its ICANN Registry Agreements. April’s .com registry report, filed with ICANN and published last week,…
Infosys Withdraws Dot-brand Bids – 15-Aug-14
Indian consulting giant Infosys has dropped its bids for two dot-brand new gTLDs. It withdrew its applications for .infosys and .infy this week, leaving it with no remaining applications. Both bids were straightforward dot-brands applications with no objections or contention. Both had passed Initial Evaluation and were just awaiting contract signing. Infosys, which provides business…
Donuts Wins .LTD gTLD Contest – 15-Aug-14
Donuts has emerged the victor of the contention set for .ltd, beating six other applicants for the new gTLD. Dot Registry, NU DOT CO, Afilias and myLTD all withdrew their applications this week, evidently after a private auction. LTD Registry and C.V. TLDcare withdrew their applications in April and May respectively. The string is of…
GoDaddy Amends IPO Filing, Reports Q2 Results – 14-Aug-14
Company continues to grow revenue as it heads toward IPO. GoDaddy released its second quarter financial results today through an amended S-1 Initial Public Offering filing with the SEC. Q2 2014 revenue came in at $338.5M, up from $276.0M in the same quarter of 2013 and $320.2M in Q1 2014. The net loss for the…
GoDaddy: Radix Landrush Fees are Fully Refundable & Always Were – 14-Aug-14
I got a message from Godaddy today in response to my story of a few days ago, that they were charging a non-refundable $160 application Landrush fee for the Radix new gTLD which start with .Press, .Website, .Host. Godaddy wrote me today and said that the $160 landrush fee was in fact refundable in…
Sued Yesterday As Part of BestRegistrar, Jeff Smith is Also Applicant for New gTLD .shop – 14-Aug-14
Yesterday we reported that Simon Property Group (SPG) sued domain name registrar BestRegistrar along with a few alleged resellers and its principals individually including a Jeff Smith to “recover control of approximately 5,000 Internet domain names rightfully owned by SPG, and to recover damages both compensatory and statutory in nature arising out of: (i) Defendants’…
Medical Domain Names All Under 2,000 Registrations After First Day – 14-Aug-14
No surprises in initial launches of four medical-themed domain names. As I previewed earlier this week, the only four domain names entering true general availability this week were medical-themed domains from Donuts. Here are how many domains are registered in each of the four after the first day, based on zone file numbers: .Dental 1,971…
German Company Now Has $1 Billion Valuation After Acquiring Pizza.de – 14-Aug-14
TechCrunch.com is reporting that the German food delivery service Delivery Hero announced today that it has acquired Pizza.de, another food delivery service also based in Germany. “The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed but we understand from a source that it is an all-cash deal, with no shares exchanged and that post-acquisition, the…
Group On’s Ideeli, Acquires & Rebrands As Ideel.com – 14-Aug-14
ideeli, the online retailer, announced today it has acquired the domain name and rebranded itself to ideel.com The company recently acquired the domain ideel.com back in June from a domain holder in France in a sale that has not been previously reported. “The company which is a discount fashion site was acquired by Groupon earlier…
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In Addition, Don’t Miss…
- DomainSherpa Discussion: .COM Sucks, Again; TRAFFIC Nom Picks; Best TLDs for Speculation…
In this DomainSherpa Discussion:
• “.COM sucks, let me tell you why” by Adrian Kinderis
• Update on Adam Dicker’s TLD+SEO Showdown
• The Ice Bucket Challenge comes to the domain industry
• Which new TLD is best for speculation this week
• T.R.A.F.F.I.C. opens nominations and the Sherpas handicap the field
• Why 420,000 new domains appeared in the zone files
• Uniregistry.com launches Domain Tracker to help you get organized
• The National Association of Realtors® announces .REALTOR
• And much more!
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