Who wants 1,440 domains? Good question.

When RegisterFly lost its ICANN accreditation, GoDaddy swooped in to take over the registration of RegisterFly clients’ domain names. It was a nice pickup for GoDaddy of nearly 1 million domain names.

So what happens when a small registrar with only 1,440 domain names under management loses its accreditation? That’s a good question, especially since a registrar has to endure a lot of trouble to get the domains.

ICANN is seeking “Expressions of Interest” from registrars to pick up the domain names managed by #1 Domain Names International, Inc. dba 1dni.com. To qualify, a registrar must complete a detailed request to ICANN including:

- Registrar experience, including number of registrations and customers managed;
- Availability of sufficient customer service staffing to timely respond to customer service requests during and shortly after the bulk transfer;
- Ability to communicate with customers in languages other than English;
- A list of the gTLDs in which accredited and operational;
- Experience with and knowledge of bulk-transfer procedures;
- Documentation of procedures to resolve potential disputes of domain name control or registration rights (in the event of contested ownership or inaccurate whois data);
- Experience as a customer-facing / “retail” registrar business;
- Experience with second-level IDNs in the com zone;
- Ability to provide ICANN with regular status reports.

That seems like a lot of work for 1,440 domains. We’ll see if ICANN’s new process for transferring domains from de-accredited registrars holds up when there’s little demand for the domains.

For its part, #1 Domain Names International’s web site still says it is an ICANN accredited registrar.

“We are small enough to be personal yet large enough to be a stable ICANN accredited registrar since 1999,” the company’s web site claims.

A search on DNForum shows a handful of complaints about the registrar, including difficulty transferring domain names out and receiving a domain renewal notice from the registrar when a domain was at a competing domain registrar.

New section allows geo-related domain names to be sold.

In yet another sign that the geo domain name market is hot, domain name forum DNForum launched a new section called “Geo Domains for Sale” earlier today.

The section is part of the Platinum Forums section, meaning you must purchase a platinum membership in order to post domains for sale. A platinum membership costs $59.95. Gold members can upgrade to platinum for $40.00.

As of now, there are only two listings in the Geo Domains section: one for ScottsdaleAriz.com and a handful of other domains, and one for SanYsidro.net.

Geo Domains come in two flavors: location domains, such as Nashville.com or Brazil.com, and long tail domains such as ChicagoLawyers.com and BaltimoreCars.com. Popular city names sell for millions of dollars, while long tail domains range from a few dollars to tens of thousands of dollars.

The new Geo Domains category joins a dozen other sales categories, such as “Domains with Traffic”, “Short Domains”, and “Offers Wanted”.

Google Ad Planner offers some wicked cool data. Some is useful for domainers.

Yesterday I took Jay Westerdal’s advice and signed up for Google Ad Planner. This tool provides incredible site statistics to estimate traffic for just about any web site.

I think the traffic stats in Google underestimate traffic for many sites, including Domain Name Wire and DNJournal. But the richness of data puts all other sources, including the easily-gamed Alexa, to shame.

One of the coolest features shows which other sites people who visited Domain Name Wire also visited. It appears to rank these by “audience rank”, which seems to be some sort of correlation of people that visit one site and another. Audience Rank does not represent total visitors to the site, but I can’t find anything in Google’s help that discusses it.

According to Google, worldwide visitors of Domain Name Wire most commonly also visit Michael Berkens’ TheDomains site. Close behind is Elliot’s blog. If you look at just U.S. visitors, Elliot’s Blog is most closely correlated. Of course, this could have a lot to do with which sites I link to the most.

Here’s what Google says for common visitors worldwide:

And here’s what it says for other popular sites with similar visitors in the U.S.:

Google apparently also knows the demographics of people visiting Domain Name Wire. It says over 80% are male and better than 30% have graduate degrees.

Google Ad Planner also shows stats for popular parked domain names, such as Rick Schwartz’ Candy.com. Google Ad Planner will be a vital research tool to use when buying parked domains and existing web sites.

Company files UDRP for generic domain name.

Who owns the South Pole?
A clothing company thinks it does.
Photo from Wikimedia Commons

The onslaught of companies trying to steal generic domain names continues.

The latest attempt is from Wicked Fashions, Inc., a clothing brand that has a couple trademarks for “SouthPole” for its clothing lines. The company wants to get its hands on SouthPole.com and filed a complaint through Nation Arbitration Forum that commenced yesterday.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that SouthPole.com doesn’t infringe on Wicked Fashions’ trademark. The domain, currently parked at DomainSponsor, doesn’t have any links related to clothing. For many years, in the hands of a previous owner, it was a full web site.

Wicked Fashions has a number of trademarks for SouthPole, including one that claims a first use in commerce in 1994.

But guess what? Other companies have South Pole trademarks. For example, there’s a South Pole brand for fresh vegetables dating all the way back to a first use in 1958. That trademark was filed in 1968.

Wicked Fashions’ domain name for SouthPole clothing is Southpole-usa.com, so it’s no wonder it wants a better domain name. But how it plans to prove that the domain infringes its trademarks and that it was registered in bad faith is beyond me.

Company wins three character domain dispute.

After losing a UDRP for the generic domain name LH.com to airline Lufthansa, Future Media Architects (FMA) has won a case against credit heavyweight Equifax for EFX.com. FMA claimed that Equifax decided to come after the domain name because it saw FMA had lost a couple other acronym domain name cases:

Complainant delayed bringing this action for five years and only brought it when it appeared that Respondent had become an easy target after a few unfortunate and wrongly decided UDRP decisions, two of which are subject to review by US District Courts.

Equifax (NYSE: EFX) uses EFX as its stock ticker on the New York Stock Exchange.

The panel found that FMA did not register the domain name in bad faith. It found that FMA did not target Equifax by registering the domain name. FMA is well known for acquiring generic two and three character domain names without any regard for which companies may happen to have the same acronym. Also, the company goes on record saying it never sells domain names.

FMA asked for a finding of reverse domain name hijacking (RDNH). The panelist denied the claim, citing in part that Equifax attempted to contact FMA prior to filing the UDRP:

Complainant has shown it has some unregistered rights in the EFX mark. Given the evidence that a letter was unfortunately sent before this action to someone who had left Respondent’s counsel’s law firm and was not received by Respondent, Complainant was effectively denied the chance to discuss matters with Respondent prior to issue of the Complaint. Although Complainant has not explained why it has taken so long to bring a Complaint the Panelist is not prepared to say Complainant brought the Complaint in bad faith. The Panelist is not prepared to make a finding of reverse disputed domain name hijacking.

Full case decision.