The government of Switzerland is trying to get its hands on three domain names owned by a Swiss citizen.

The government claims to have a right to three specific URLs – www.schweiz.ch, www.suisse.ch and www.svizzera.ch (all translate to the country’s name) and wants to use the domains for it www.ch.ch site. Switzerland is going to WIPO to try to get the domains.

This seems to be a clear case of reverse domain name hijacking. The owner of the domains, Stefan C. Frei, registered the domains back in 1995. It would be like the US government going after the owner of UnitedStates.com.

According to an article at Swissinfo.org:

The authorities approached [Frei] for the first time in 2000 and told him they needed his URLs for a virtual desk, an official site aimed at making services of the administration more accessible to citizens.

He refused to hand over his web address, but suggested the authorities use an alternative URL – www.ch.ch – for this purpose, which they have been doing since.

Several years on, the chancellery argues it wants the coveted address to further develop e-government, the state’s electronic services, he said.

Frei said he had offered to put a banner with a special link on his site to attract possible readers to the federal administration website, but his suggestion fell on deaf ears.

Just a day after after SatellitePhone.com grabbed a $50k bid on Afternic, VoIPService.com has met its reserve of $25,000.

The domain will sell to the highest bidder within the next 7 days. This domain had been in Afternic’s Showcase Domains section for a while. It’s good to see domains in the showcase sell. Another domain from the showcase, hepamasks.com, has also met its reserve.

It’s interesting to see two domains in “closing soon” at Afternic with such a high value. Just today Afternic sent out a newsletter that discussed the “closing soon” section and the value it can add to domains. Afternic recently sold a 3 character domain that hit reserve at $10,000 but closed at $25,000 while sitting on the front page for all of those eyeballs to see.

Some of the other closing soon domains at Afternic right now include:

Domain/Bid/Time Left
0HOUR.com 200 20h 9m
DARKVILLE.com 950 1d 23h
people-search.biz 1,510 2d 0h
talentbuzz.com 600 2d 3h
CareersHQ.com 1,000 2d 16h
AmazingMagic.net 400 3d 4h
VintageWineTours.com 100 4d 20h
BEST-OFFERS.com 2,000 5d 13h
fbb.net 1,220 5d 14h

UPDATE: PainControl.com has now entered the closing soon phase with a bid of $15,000!

SatellitePhone.com has met its $50,000 reserve on Afternic.

With just under 6 days remaining, SatellitePhone.com is about to sell at domain exchange Afternic. The domain has a “buy now” price of $90,000.

The market for satellite phones is booming. Overture shows 36,907 searches for the term in January and the top bid on Overture is $5.33.

In other domain sales news, DNJournal has released its latest sales data. NHS.com took top honors this week after selling for $151,300 through Moniker. Looks.com sold for $86,650 in an expired domain auction at SnapNames.

Number 11 on the .com list was Godfather.com at €15,000. I recall DNForum owner Adam Dicker griping on his boards about making an offer on this domain only to have the owner counter with a $1M price tag. (It does not appear that Adam bought the domain.)

Domain Name Wire is now one of the top 100,000 sites on the web, according to Alexa.

To some sites it’s no big deal, and I hope the site keeps climbing, but Domain Name Wire has finally broken into the “5 digit” range in Alexa’s web rankings. At the time of posting, the site is currently number 97,318.

Traffic to the site is rapidly increasing. In January DNW rang up about 25,000 uniques and over 60,000 page views. This month should easily clear that hurdle.

Many thanks to loyal readers – whether you have bookmarked the site or subscribe to the RSS fee – thanks!

eNom’s Club Drop service increased its minimum bid again.

It seems like if eNom didn’t increase its expired domain prices a couple times a year we’d start to worry if they were OK. Today they announced that the mininum bid for all domains will increase to $30 tomorrow. Currently, you can bid less than $30 but you have to bid $30 to enter into a competitive auction. Frequently, you could bid $20 for a domain and win. But no longer.

eNom also announced special “Drop Deals” where you can grab domains for $10 plus one year of registration. eNom has offered a number of domains like this in the past, especially for four character domains. I suspect that eNom will use “Drop Deals” to get rid of domains that were caught using its service but the buyer never paid.

eNom was one of the few drop catching services not mentioned in today’s Wall Street Journal article about domain drop catching.