Bret Fausett is reporting that .xxx has been taken off the agenda at the Vancouver ICANN meetings. This doesn’t surprise me much. Conservatives dropped support after they realized that adding .xxx wouldn’t mean all porn would be moved to the new extension.

More to follow…

It looks like the big domain name buyers ate a lot of turkey last week and spent time with their families rather than buying domain names. But DNJournal still had some good domain name sales to report.

The highest reported sale over the past week was RapidRefund.com which sold for $52,945 through Moniker. Tax season is just around the corner in the U.S.

FreeAgent.com sold for $10,100 at Afternic, which seems like a good deal for the buyer.

A typo domain, Mypsace.com, sold for $35,100 at Sedo. This domain has an “Overture Score” of 2,976, which means it gets a lot of type-ins. It always amazes me when typos sell for this much, as MySpace.com could clearly when this domain through a trademark dispute. Perhaps the buyers have enough typos that they’re not worried about losing some of them. Plus, they’ll make a lot of money between now and when the UDRP makes its decision. I also wonder how Sedo justifies selling a domain like this when their terms clearly state that they won’t list domains that potentially infringe on a trademark. A few other typo sales this week (these over at SnapNames) include LinenAndThings.com for $6,313, CarrierBuilders.com for $5,655, and HondaFinacialServices.com for $4,777.

“New” TLDs continue to sell well but the chart is nothing like last week’s. Car.biz sold for €11,900 at Sedo. The next highest sale was Costumes.info for €2,625. And talk about a steal–WiFi.info went for only $1,400 at Snapnames.

Sega, maker of popular video games like Sonic the Hedgehog, has let one of its game’s domains expire, as pointed out at Joystiq. Shenmue.com expired on Nov 19. The domain was registered through NetSol, so if it isn’t renewed it will drop through Snapnames. The domain has a pagerank of 5 and 1,270 incoming Yahoo links, and has been online since 1998.

Someone needs to keep better records at Sega. Like many large companies, they probably manage their domain names on an old-fashioned spreadsheet. I worked at a Fortune 100 company that did just that.

I’ve bought–and sold–many domains on domain name exchanges like Sedo and Afternic. These transactions usually go well because of the exchanges’ built in escrow services. I’ve been able to complete transactions–including the domain transfer–in as few as two days.

But it doesn’t always go as planned. Twice I have “bought” domains on Afternic which turn out to no longer be owned by the seller. A few months ago I bought a 3 character domain for about $5,000. The seller started escrow and agreed to the transaction, only to email me a day later and say that it was an error and the domain was sold the week prior. Just yesterday I found a domain I like when searching at Whois.sc. I clicked over to the Afternic listing and placed a bid at $650. The seller subsequenly set the reserve at $650 with an asking price of $850. I bid $850 to “Buy it Now”. The escrow transaction started, but then I noticed that the Whois information for the domain was different than the Whois information for the seller’s other domains. I asked the seller about it, and the seller realized that she must have sold the domain or it expired sometime ago.

I can see how this happens. Heck, I probably have domains listed on exchanges that I’ve sold in the past and just forgot to delete. Sedo does a good job of at least verifying the domains are owned by the seller prior to posting. This can sometimes be a pain but reduces problems in the long run. Afternic doesn’t verify ownership prior to listing unless the domain is already listed by another seller. What the exchanges need to do is to verify ownership any time there’s a change in Whois. This shouldn’t be too hard if managed through a company like Whois.sc.

Has anyone else experienced similar problems?

Domain name industry experts have been voicing their opinions about ICANN’s proposed legal settlement with Verisign, which gives Verisign control of the .com registry through 2012. With ICANN’s Vancouver meeting starting in just two days, a group of businesses have filed a lawsuit claiming the settlement violates US Antitrust laws.

I’m opposed to the settlement for a number of reasons, but using US antitrust law as the wrench is an old argument. A lawyer for the plaintiffs says that the agreement fixes the registry cost of .com domain names at above market rates. But this has always been the case. The registry is awarded to a company based on more than just price and you can’t have more than one registry manager for a given domain extension. I suspect that many of the companies behind this lawsuit are alternative registries (e.g. Afilias). Success by the plaintiffs would nullify most existing registry agreements–including the current .com agreement with Verisign, which has a guaranteed renewal provision.