Today’s Wall Street Journal discusses the fight over Whois privacy.

The article on the front page of the Marketplace section starts by discussing how the American Red Cross and eBay use the Whois database to track down scammers:

Last fall, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the American Red Cross used an Internet database called “Whois” that lists names and numbers of Web-site owners to shut down dozens of unauthorized Web sites that were soliciting money under the Red Cross logo. Online marketplace eBay Inc. says its investigators use Whois hundreds of times a day to pursue scamsters. Insurance giant Transamerica recently used Whois to trace the owner of a Web site purportedly in the Middle East but actually U.S.-based — that was selling insurance by infringing on the Transamerica trademark.

It discusses how proposed rules would allow Whois to list only a technical contact for each domain name. A technical contact could be a web hosting company rather than an individual owner.

This would make it difficult for trademark owners to send cease and desist letters to people they think are cybersquatting. Trademark owners would have to skip this step and go directly to a UDRP or get a subpoena. This could be bad for domainers, as typically the issue can be worked out at the cease and desist stage.

The Wall Street Journal article says that registrars would benefit from the Whois changes because more people would be willing to register domains. But it doesn’t address how the registrars are making millions from offering Whois privacy services. That revenue would completely disappear (although it is already being marginalized as registrars start offering privacy for free).

At last week’s Domain Roundtable, ICANN CEO Paul Twomey commented on Whois privacy. From my previous entry:

Twomey suggested that many people in the room are probably on the side of more privacy, not less privacy, in the Whois database. Twomey posed the question “what is your true business need for more privacy”. Without taking a side on the issue, Twomey urged that domainers look at the long term implications of privacy. He noted the importance of offering access to such information to law enforcement. If law enforcement doesn’t have access to this information and something big happens – say terrorism in which having access to this data is crucial – governments might make snap judgments that will hurt privacy even more.

I understand the need for privacy in certain circumstances. One way registrars sell Whois privacy is to tell domain registrants about the spam their email address will get if it’s listed in Whois. I recently changed the Whois email address for many of my domains to a unique email to track Whois spam (I’ll post about the results of my experiment later). But I also get dozens of calls to my number listed in Whois each month from people trying to sell me things. I propose that all email addresses in Whois be forwarding addresses. For example, domainnamewire.com would be something like domainnamewirecom@icann.org. This would allow ICANN or another body to track the biggest offenders of Whois spam.

If Whois requirements are changed I hope that registrants still have the option of listing themselves (other than as a technical contact). Whois is used frequently for unsolicited domain purchase offers. None of us would like to see those disappear!

ICANNWiki has the latest info about the domain industry with a particular focus on key players.

I caught up with Ray King, former CEO of Snapnames, last week at Domain Roundtable. I first met Ray at a search engine optimization conference in New York a little over a year ago. Ray is working on a new venture called AboutUs. While he gets AboutUs off the ground he has co-created ICANNWiki, a wiki specific to the domain name industry.

Ray doesn’t make half-baked efforts, and his selfless contribution to the domain community shows in ICANNWiki. A wiki is a collaborative environment edited by a community. ICANNWiki is, naturally, specific to the domain world. It covers the people, companies, and groups that make the domain industry click.

Ray is putting a lot of effort into the wiki. At Domain Roundtable he had a system set up for people to easily enter themselves into the wiki. A camera attached to a computer snapped a picture of each domainer to add to their profile. These pictures were then sent to an artist in California who created a caricature for each profile. You can see mine here. (Hey, caricatures aren’t meant to be flattering!).

If you’re active in the domain community or just starting to get your hands dirty, visit ICANNWiki to “meet” the people, companies, and groups you’re working with.

Forbes published an article about GoDaddy and the prospects of domain registrars.

The article is a good summary and points out that registrars make very little money on domain registrations. The article focuses on another revenue source — revenue from parked domains. In this case it’s domains registered at GoDaddy that the owners aren’t doing anything with. These domains resolve to GoDaddy parking pages fed by Google ads.

The article quotes Dotster chairman Kevin Kilroy, who is also trying to grow his registration business. Jay Westerdal of Name Intelligence (which put on last week’s successful Domain Roundtable conference) came to the defense of the domain registration business, arguing that registrars with at least 100,000 domains can be successful.

Absent from the article are details about how much registrars are currently making from webhosting and other product add-ons. I’ve always assumed that webhosting was as big as advertising revenue. If GoDaddy goes public we might get more details on the economics of domain registrars. The only major public registrar right now is Tucows, which plays a lot in the domain wholesale business. Network Solutions and Register.com were public but have been taken private.

A newbie asks some good questions.

I received an e-mail from a new domainer yesterday. He asked good questions so I’m going to respond through the blog.

>I’m new to the domain game, and must say that I enjoy your site. There’s
>a few things I just “don’t get,” and was wondering if you could shed some
>light on them.
>
>But first, I thought you might be interested to know that
>homeimprovement.net, a dropped name picked up by Pool, went for $8,733 in
>the closed auction (only open to others that backordered it). I know
>because I participated in the auction (I stopped chasing it at around $7
>K). (hated that fact that they have no support people to call on the
>weekend, and don’t meet their 24 hr email return policy, but that’s
>another story). What do you think it could fetch if the buyer turned
>arount and tried to flip it to the broader domain community?

The domain dropping markets are fairly efficient, so the final bid price is probably fair. Sometimes domains go for more during the drop than they would on the resale market because people get swept into the excitement of auctions. Could HomeImprovement.net sell for than $9,000 in the aftermarket? It could, but .nets aren’t known for swapping hands at high prices.

>Who do you think are the best companies to deal with when trying to pick
>up dropped names?

This is a tough question now that so many drop services have exclusive agreements with registars to grab their dropping names. SnapNames gets most of the great domains because of their relationship with Network Solutions and Register.com. These were the two early and big registrars, so they have a lot of old domains that expire. Pool.com has lost is luster because it doesn’t have the exclusive relationships the other drop services have. eNom’s Club Drop is fairly good. NameWinner.com is a good source to catch domains dropping from Dotster. GoDaddy’s TDNAM is decent but only captures GoDaddy’s expiring domains.

>Here’s what I don’t get:
>
>- 3 letter domain names - why are the so valueable when most of them seem
>like jibberish to me?

One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. 3 letter domains are rare, easy-to-remember, and are acronyms for a number of companies. Let’s take three random letters …RBC. RBC.com is the domain of RBC Financial Group. Here are some other companies that would like to be known by this short Moniker: Regal Beloitte CP (publicly traded), Radio Bible Club Ministries, and several others.

Here are some other things you can do with RBC.com.

>- alexa page ranked names that again seem like jibberish to me e.g. IR3X
>for $65,000. What that all about?

IR3x.com gets a lot of traffic. The buyer knew this because of the domain’s “Overture Score“. This represents the number of times someone entered “IR3X.com” into a search box or search toolbar related to Yahoo’s network during one month. IR3X’s OVT+Ext score for March was 2,884. If almost three thousand people accidentally searched the the URL then you can bet a lot of people typed it into the browser.

>- alexa page rank - I don’t understand the ranking system. Is it that
>important?

Yes and no. It’s a good way to measure the traffic a domain gets, but it must be used with caution. It measures traffic based on its user base, including people who have downloaded the Alexa Toolbar. You’ll find high Alexa ranks for domains that are more likely to be visited by Alexa users (including Alexa.com). This number can potentially be manipulated. Overture scores can also be manipulated. You must look at the complete picture: Alexa Rank, Overture Score, inbound links, previous owner’s stats, value of the keywords, and common sense.

>I’d also appreciate it if you point me in the direction of any
>resources/tools that you think I might find useful.

SnapCheck.com is a free resource for finding quality expiring domain names. Once you get serious about this business, you need to pick up a copy of Domain Research Tool. It costs $249, but it’s well worth the price. Visit the Domain Research Tool web site for details.

>
>thanks,
>Reader

Dotster is offering two domains for $2 this Wednesday.

The next Dotster happy hour will be this Wednesday starting at 4PM Easter/3 PM Central. The offer will be buy one .com, .net., .org, .us or .biz for $2 and get a .info for free. That’s one regular domain and one .info for $2 total.

Dotster is also offering domain registration for $.99 with the purchase of any non-domain item of $6.99 or more. This is similar to the offer GoDaddy‘ helped popularize (domains for $1.99 with any non-domain purchase). However, it appears Dotster is adding the $6.99 qualification to prevent any pricing mistakes. Domainers are known for finding loopholes in GoDaddy’s system to buy domains for $1.99 with add-ons that cost a few dollars or less.