ICANN Ombudsman responds to IRT complaint, but after IRT released final report

ICANN Ombudsman Dr. Frank Fowlie responded to Internet Commerce Association’s complaints about Implementation Recommendation Team, a trademark-interests group that has proposed sweeping changes to domain disputes and allocation. Internet Commerce Association (ICA) calls the Ombudsman’s response “Tardy, Nonresponsive and Non-persuasive”. In a post on its web site, ICA counsel Phil Corwin found a number of faults with the Ombudsman’s response.

On June 3, 2009 — the week after the IRT released its Final Report and concluded its work – we received an official report from the Ombudsman. Not only was this response received too late to do any possible good (on the off chance that our allegations were determined to be valid by this ICANN accountability procedure) but it failed to ever grapple with our central contention — that the IRT was a “constituent body” bound by the Bylaws. As for whether the ICANN community was provided with clear and timely notice of the opportunity to apply to be a member of the IRT, the documents offered up by the Ombudsman to prove that point actually prove the opposite.

Having read both letters, it certainly seems that the question of whether or not IRT is a constituent body was largely avoided.

My take is, that by including only like-minded trademark interests in its group, IRT will likely face an uphill battle getting buy-in to its plan. It will be interesting to see how its recommendations are received at the upcoming ICANN meeting in Sydney, as well as what ICANN does in the face of any push back.

A weekend of domain festivities in Washington D.C.

Domain Roundtable officially kicked off this evening in Washington, D.C. at the Grand Hyatt. But this weekend was filled with unofficial activities for a few of the early arrivers.

Saturday evening David and Michael Castello graciously treated a dozen early arrivals to dinner at Central Michel Richard. In attendance were a number of familiar domain industry faces such as Phil Corwin of Internet Commerce Association and Mike Mann, founder of BuyDomains.

On Sunday, Mann held a party at his Bethesda home for about 75 internet industry professionals. The crowd consisted of people attending Domain Roundtable as well as a number of local internet entrepreneurs. Some of those in attendance run companies partially funded by Mann, such as SEO.com.

Here’s a picture from the back of Mann’s house:

While roaming the inside of Mann’s house, I noticed a handful of his former license plates:

This evening Domain Roundtable kicked off with a welcome cocktail. It was scheduled to end at 9 pm, but at 9:30 the crowd showed no signs of abating.

Look for full coverage tomorrow on Domain Name Wire.

I had to settle for a second-rate vanity URL. But I don’t care.

At the stroke of midnight last night thousands of techies were sitting at their computers trying to get a crack at the ideal vanity Facebook URL, such as FaceBook.com/name. I was well aware of this URL landrush but opted to sit on the sidelines. Why? Ironically, because I was socially networking.

The difference is I was being social in person. I’m in Washington D.C. and was at a bar with my college roommate and his girlfriend. At the stroke of midnight I could have fumbled with my phone to try to logon to Facebook, or I could have insisted on running back to the apartment to jump online.

But wouldn’t that defeat the purpose? The idea of social networking is to connect with friends and colleagues. Sometimes this online connecting gets in the way of real connections. Facebook has had a tremendous effect on how we stay in touch with friends new and old. Yet it seems that it also relegates our connections to insensitive, unmeaningful interactions. It reminds me of the time one of my wife’s friends sent a bulk text message to many of her friends on a holiday telling them how much they mean to her.

I logged on to Facebook when I got back to the apartment last night. My first choice of vanity URL wasn’t available. But that’s less important than spending time with old friends.

A statistical look at a slice of the domain name market.

Most people agree that the investor aftermarket for domain names isn’t as lofty as it was a couple years ago. Just look at the mood and total sales at live domain auctions for proof. But gathering data to prove this is difficult.

Richard Wixom of DNSalePrice recently took at stab at it, but with a different conclusion: the domain aftermarket is doing just fine, thank you. The drop in domain prices over the past year or two is small compared to the drop in the stock market. At least for three character domains.

Wixom took a narrow band of domain sales that he believes creates a good proxy for the investor market overall: three character domain sales under $30,000. He charted sales from January 2005 to May 2009, stripped out domains with q, x, y, or z, IDNs, and three letter domains that are words. Wixom then plotted these sales on a graph, added a polynomial trend line, and overlayed the Dow Jones Industrial Average. The picture tells the story:

I’m not inclined to see this limited set of data as a proxy for the domain aftermarket overall, but it’s the best attempt I’ve seen to quantify the domain pricing trend using disclosed sales values. One difference between three character domains and the market at large is that three character domains are much more liquid.

I cut Wixom’s data another way, adding in sales over $30,000 and calculating the median. The data show that median prices of three letter domains rose sharply from 2005 to 2007, held steady in 2008, and then dropped substantially in 2009 (with very limited data so far). The median sales price in 2005 was $6,700, 2006 was $10,175, and both 2007 and 2008 was $12,500. So far in 2009, with the disclosed data on DNSalePrice, the median three letter sale is $6,250.

This doesn’t present enough data to suggest a 50% drop year over year, but you don’t need numbers to tell you that the investor resale price of three letter domains has fallen this year. I think it has bottomed out.

Article says domain name auction yesterday would have been “one of the first”.

A planned real estate domain name auction yesterday in San Francisco fizzled as no one placed bids. But an article in the San Francisco Chronicle about the auction will give you a chuckle. It suggests that this would have been “one of the first” live domain auctions:

The few who showed up felt more comfortable negotiating in private – removing the sale from public view and scuttling what would have been one of the first – and probably classiest – live auctions of domain names in the history of the Internet.

Classiest, perhaps. But one of the first? The author needs to do a little fact checking.

By the way, the next live domain name auction will take place in Washington D.C. on Tuesday afternoon.