DNS management company acquires the perfect domain name.

What happens when a DNS company with a domainer background wants to upgrade its brand? It acquires the category-killer, three letter domain name DNS.com.

Comwired, which offers hosted DNS management services, acquired DNS.com and is changing its brand. It appears the acquisition was made about two months ago, but the company is just now undergoing the rebrand.

In a press release, Comwired CEO Dan Kimball said “This opportunity was the next step in solidifying our position in the DNS marketplace while also giving clients a peace of mind that they are being supported by a highly-robust, and economically practical DNS solution. Like many of our customers, we pride ourselves on being a technology- and service-oriented business. The DNS.com domain is a powerful asset which will help expand our online community through increased name recognition and memorability.”

The acquisition price was not disclosed.

Here comes 1.info.

The ICANN Board approved a resolution granting Afilias the right to register one and two character .info domain names during its Board meeting last Thursday.

.Info registry Afilias made the request in February. It plans to model the distribution of the short domain names similar to how Neustar handled the release of one and two character .biz domain names:

1. Requests for Proposal, where anyone can submit a proposal for developing a particular name. Afilias will award domains to RFPs that meet its goal of broadening awareness of .info.

2. Auction of any domain not given during the RFP

3. Open registration

Neustar’s release of the short domain names resulted in some good sales, particularly ones that could take advantage of the .biz extension. e.Biz sold for $66,001. Most one character .biz domains sold for about $5,000 to $15,000, whereas the typical two character domain sold for under $1,000.

The biggest lift in Neustar’s case was inking a deal with Overstock to launch O.biz through its RFP process. It will be interesting to see if Afilias is able to get any big name companies to sign on.

Four IDN ccTLDs delegated, simultaneous delegation requests from China and Taiwan proceed.

The ICANN Board of Directors approved the delegation of four internationalized domain name country code domains on Thursday.

The four approved ccTLDs are for Russia, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and Egypt.

Russia will get .рф (xn--p1ai) (“R.F.”), delegated to Coordination Center for TLD RU. Saudi Arabia is getting السعودية (xn--mgberp4a5d4ar) (“Al-Saudia”), to be managed by Communications and Information Technology Commission. U.A.E. will get امارات (xn--mgbaam7a8h) (“Emarat”), delegated to Telecommunications Regulatory Authority. Finally, Egypt picks up مصر (xn--wgbh1c ) (“Misr”), delegated to National Telecommunication Regulatory Authority.

Separately, the ICANN Board approved two simultaneous delegation requests to proceed to the String Delegation step of the fast track process. China requested simultaneous delegation of simplified and traditional renderings .中国 (xn--fiqs8S) and .中國 (xn--fiqz9S); Taiwan requested 台灣 (xn--kpry57d) and .台湾 (xn--kprw13d).

In another country code top level domain decision, ICANN’s board approved a redelegation request from United Republic of Tanzania for the traditional .TZ country code domain name to Tanzania Network Information Centre Limited.

After hiatus, GoDrops.com goes live again today.

GoDrops.com, a service for finding expiring domain names, relaunched today.

The service was originally created by Jason Cupp. Cupp partnered with Patrick Ruddell (aka Chef Patrick) last year with plans to upgrade and relaunch the service. The result of their efforts finally goes live today.

GoDrops provides a daily list of hand-picked expiring domain names. Paying members ($19.97 per month) also see values from Estibot, cost-per-click data, frequency, age, and searches for each domain. Paying members get access to the data 24 hours in advance. They also get data for .com, .net, .org, .us, .info, .biz, .me, .tv and .ca instead of just .com/.net for non-paying members. GoDrops plans to add more TLDs each month.

Compared to other expired domain services, GoDrops limits the data for each domain to provide a good user experience. It’s also well known for its daily online chat between 2pm – 3 pm EST when the daily list is released.

Wooot.com case needs proofreading; sheds light on UDRP panelist practices.

Yesterday Elliot Silver wrote a post about the UDRP decision for Wooot.com. The panelist found in the complainant’s favor, but ordered the domain name canceled rather than transferred.

I have to admit, even as someone who reads a lot of UDRPs, until about a month ago I assumed that canceled meant transfer. Why? Because it’s so stupid to think of a domain being deleted rather than transferred to the winner. If it’s deleted, someone else will just pick it up.

But as it turns out, they are two different things. It’s right there in the UDRP rules. There’s a long running joke about how some inexperienced counsel will ask for a remedy of a domain being “canceled” instead of transferred, not realizing what will happen if they win.

But in the case of Wooot.com, it seems that the panelist just opted for the language “canceled”. I’m inclined to think this may be because he (or someone connected to National Arbitration Forum) was cutting and pasting bits and pieces from other decisions. Why? Let’s break down a couple things from the Wooot.com decision.

First, under “Parties Contentions”, the decision starts out stating:

Complainant held a trademark registration for “AOL” and Respondent registered the domain name “iaol.com”.

Huh? AOL? The complainant is Woot.com. As it turns out, iAOL.com is a completely different UDRP case from 2002 from a different panelist.

Then under “Additional Submissions” it states:

The submission of Respondents is that the Complainant’s arguments in its letter written by its representative P. Weston Musselman Jr. makes does not substantiate its Claims. And the submission of the complainant is that

It literally stops at “that”. I have no idea if this guy Musselman was actually involved with this case or if this is from another case.

Is this a matter of cutting-and-pasting from other decisions?

George Kirikos started digging into it and found something interesting. Take a look at another decision by the same panelist, which states:

“Having established all three elements required under the ICANN Policy, the Panel concludes that relief shall be DENIED”.

That’s a contradictory statement. If they established all elements it would be granted.

Kirikos found 41 instances of various panelists writing that same contradictory statement in their decisions. (See comments here for exact case numbers.) So they’re either cutting and pasting or not paying attention. Either is a bit disconcerting.