GoDaddy Surprises Customers with Retroactive Refund
“Dear (Client Name) The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN®) recently agreed to reduce their Registrar Transaction Fee from $.25 to $.22. What does this mean for you? Good news. You have been credited $.03/yr for each domain name you registered or renewed dating back to July 1, 2006* — $.03 has been [...]
Cybersquatting Attracts Media Attention
A new report from MarkMonitor claims the top 25 brands from the 2006 Top 100 Interbrand list are the victims of 275,000 cybersquatting cases. This report has been picked up by mainstream news sources such as BusinessWeek, Computerworld and PC Magazine. MarkMonitor is a privately held firm in the business of selling their service to [...]
RegisterFly's Implosion Nears Its Bizarre End
In the world of domainers, it seems one name is on everyone’s lips. The RegisterFly debacle has all the aspects of a front-page scandal: sex, CEO spending excesses, a class action lawsuit and a $6,000 Chihuahua. The company, founded in 2000, was managed by John Naruszewicz and Kevin Medina. From the outside, things were going [...]
Is ICANN The New USSR?
In an interview with The Register, former publicly elected ICANN board member Karl Auerbach alleges that ICANN resembles the now defunct Soviet Union: The organization, he says, has set up a Soviet-style pseudo democracy, insulates itself from Internet users, and resembles a central bureaucracy that is working on the latest five-year plan. Auerbach favors a [...]
.INFO and .ORG Wholesale Prices Will Also Increase
Following suit to the recently announced wholesale price increase for .com and .net domains, the wholesale fees for .info and .org domains are going up 2.5 percent in mid-October. The .info increase takes effect on Oct. 15, while .org prices will go up on Oct. 18. As for domain suffix popularity, .org and .info rank [...]
RegisterFly Ordered To Hand Over Registrant Data
Troubled domain registrar RegisterFly has been ordered by a US Federal Court to hand over to ICANN current and accurate data for all of its domain names, and to immediately allow ICANN staff access to the company's records and books in order to perform an audit. "We ask RegisterFly and its management to co-operate fully [...]
Domain Names As Property?
The market is already crazy for domains and good domains are increasingly scarce but at this time, what domain buyers get is actually a service contract, which means that it's currently not possible to actually "own" a domain in the traditional sense. It's more like a subscription where you pay for usage rights. What do [...]