“Meet the seller” shows these auctions may be bogus.

I was excited to see that Used.com and Penny.com were on auction at Sedo today. These are both six figure domains. But my excitement was tempered after looking at the “meet the seller” data on the auctions.

“Meet the seller” is a new feature Sedo introduced this week. It allows you to see details about the seller of a domain, including their country, when they joined Sedo, and a rating of their activity.

For both Used.com and Penny.com, the seller shows as being in the Philippines. But the owner of Penny.com is in Connecticut and Used.com is in Minnesota. Furthermore, the seller just joined Sedo in April and has no seller rating.

I’ve contacted Sedo to investigate and will let you know when I hear back. If it turns out these are bogus auctions, then Sedo’s new features will have proven valuable. Before “meet the seller” I’d think little about these auctions and they would continue without questioning. We’d get excited, spend time bidding, only to find out we wasted our time.

Update 2:50PM: Sedo has canceled the auctions:

We have canceled these two auctions as it is clear that the person who listed them is not the owner. We do have systems in place to prevent people from listing domains they do not own, but unfortunately some will occasionally get through and we don’t catch it as early as we would like. Of course this is frustrating and we are constantly looking at ways to minimize this with automatic and manual methods.

I would like to stress to our customers that all they have been somewhat inconvenienced, they are not in any danger of losing money, as a seller is not paid until a domain is transferred.

I think Sedo does a good job verifying listings, but obviously it’s not impossible to slip something through.

.Asia sunrise auctions are over with solid results.

I haven’t written much about .asia, a new top level domain. Perhaps it’s because I think it’s a silly domain (coming soon, .SouthAmerica!). So I missed the conclusion of the .asia sunrise period auctions earlier this month. Here’s a look at the top sales:

discover.asia $112,111
sex.asia 83334
buy.asia 73000
sexshop.asia 53607
gold.asia 46602
models.asia 41009
homes.asia 40000
gifts.asia 38003
book.asia 34005
apartments.asia 31000
pharmacy.asia 29855
sexy.asia 29001
business.asia 29000
girl.asia 28556
diamond.asia 28000
promotion.asia 26000
vodka.asia 25000
car.asia 24001
spa.asia 23200
gps.asia 22515
resorts.asia 22501
fant.asia 22501
sushi.asia 22500
online.asia 22155
baby.asia 21505
cooking.asia 21500
videos.asia 21019
sourcing.asia 21001
ace.asia 20501
pos.asia 20500
southeast.asia 20500
roulette.asia 20500
youporn.asia 20499
vacation.asia 20000

The auctions were not without controversy as bidders complained of bid rigging and collusion. The auctions were held at Pool.com.

So what’s the big deal with .asia? Well, Asia is big with a massively growing internet population. But I doubt people associate themselves with “Asia” as opposed to their country. And non-roman character domains make a lot more sense than many of these English domains that sold at auction. Right? Or am I just a naive American? Judging from the results of .eu, I doubt it.

Expired domain and domain auction platform hit by outage.

Domain name auction site Snapnames is unavailable again, marking at least the 4th major outage this summer. A notice on the company’s web site for at least the past hour reads “The SnapNames site is temporarily unavailable. We’re sorry for this brief inconvenience. Please try again in a few minutes”.

The first time I noticed the outage was shortly after the scheduled conclusion of the Search Engine Strategies silent auction this afternoon. It is unclear if the silent auction concluded successfully before the site went down. [Update: Moniker tells me that all SES auctions completed successfully before the site problems.]

Earlier this month the site was down for a couple days. SnapNames also experienced a prolonged outage over the Fourth of July weekend. SnapNames has since blamed a third party service provider for the problems.

Prior to this summer, SnapNames had not experienced major interruptions like these.

Renew domains before end of September to avoid additional fees.

It’s that time of year again — time for VeriSign (NASDAQ: VRSN) and other registries to increase their wholesale price of domain names.

VeriSign’s wholesale prices for .com and .net increase on October 1, 2008. The new .com price will be $6.86. With ICANN’s 20 cent fee that means the minimum cost to your registrar is $7.06. .Net prices will be $4.23 before ICANN’s fee.

Earlier today Domain Name Wire wrote about GoDaddy’s latest price increase on .net and .org domains, which have shot up about 30% to $13.19 including the ICANN fee.

Almost all of the registries are increasing prices, and eNom sent out a notice today that its prices will increase 50 cents effective September 30. You can expect other registrars to follow.

It’s amazing that the wholesale price of domains is increasing while domain registrations are ballooning. Most of the registry costs are fixed, and the cost to manage each incremental domain goes down as more are registered. But don’t blame VeriSign, Public Interest Registry, and the other registries. They have a monopoly on their extensions, and if ICANN is going to give them free reign to raise prices each year, they may as well max it out. Registrar complaints that they’ll have to pass on the costs to customers fall on deaf years since big registrars such as GoDaddy have pricing that doesn’t have any correlation to wholesale cost. .Net prices, anyone?

You can beat the price increase by renewing your domains before October. If you have domains you know you’ll hold onto for many years, go ahead and renew them at today’s rates for multiple years.

Think UDRP panels are inconsistent? Here’s proof.

If you think UDRP panel decisions are inconsistent, look no further than three cases involving New York grocer The Food Emporium. It filed three separate actions under UDRP for FoodEmporium.com, FoodEmporium.net, and FoodEmporium.org. It won .org but lost the other two.

There are reasons for the differences, including the registrant of .org not responding to the complaint. But if you read the decisions you’ll see inconsistencies. For example, the panel on the .com writes:

“Respondent’s use of the generic term in its domain name as a means of attracting Internet users to its website to access hyperlinks that offer goods and services related to the generic term is legitimate.”

OK, so a parked page is a legitimate use, right? Not according to the panel on the .org:

“Respondent is using the foodemporium.org domain name to advertise links to third-party competitors. The Panel finds that such use is not a bona fide offering of goods or services under Policy ¶ 4(c)(i) or a legitimate noncommercial or fair use under Policy ¶ 4(c)(iii)”.

Also, the panel on .com found that The Food Emporium’s case for the domain being confusingly similar was “very close”, while in the .org it just said it was confusingly similar.

Hmm.

So why did The Food Emporium win one and lose the others other than these discrepancies?

Frank Schilling’s Name Administration owns FoodEmporium.com. John Berryhill defended the domain and successfully argued that the term “Food Emporium” is generic and that Schilling didn’t know about the New York grocery chain.

Name Media (BuyDomains) owns FoodEmporium.net. Not only does the company have a solid record of only registering generic domain names, but it also signed affidavits ensuring the panel that it did not register the domain with the New York grocery chain in mind. It also showed that the trademark was filed after the initial registration (although the grocery chain claims common law rights extending back into the 1980s). The panel found that it wasn’t registered in bad faith.

FoodEmporium.org is protected by whois privacy at Intercosmos. The registrant never responded.

This is an excellent case study for defending your domains properly. But above that, it shows gross inconsistencies between panels.