A look back at June in domaining.

It’s the last day of June, which means it’s time to review the top five stories on Domain Name Wire over the past month. They are ranked by total number of views.

1. Yahoo Settles Lawsuit and Gets Flicker.com Domain Name – After many years of neglect, Flicker.com can now be put to good use: redirecting internet users who know how to spell to the correct web address.

2. Web.com Buys Register.com for $135 Million – One of the original domain name registrars is changing hands again.

3. Fannie Mae Spends $50,000 to Buy Domain Name – Your tax dollars at work, folks.

4. Court Greenlights Sex.com Order – A bankruptcy court judge approved a deal among Sex.com’s shareholders and creditors, paving the wave for an eventual sale of the domain by Sedo.

5. iPad is No Domain Name Killer, Nor a Kindle Killer – Analysis of the iPad after a couple days.

HostingCon comes to the Lone Star State.

The web hosting industry is descending on Austin, Texas next month for HostingCon. The event will take place at the Austin Convention Center July 19-21. Tickets are still available, starting at $489 for the entire three day conference.

I’ve identified a number of domain name related companies that will be in attendance and/or exhibiting:

dotMobi
eNom
OpenSRS (Tucows)
LogicBoxes/Reseller Club
Dark Blue Sea
VeriSign
Afilias

So why would domain companies come to a hosting show? Two main reasons:

1. Most domain name registrars make a good chunk of their revenue from web hosting add-on sales.

2. Web hosts are a good channel for selling domain registrations.

dotMobi will no doubt push for web hosts to offer .mobi domains to their customers and provide mobile web site building applications. VeriSign and Afilias will likely push their security and DNS solutions.

HostingCon is organized by iNET Interactive.

If you’re coming to town for the event, drop me a line.

Credit report companies spar over domain names.

Adaptive Marking LLC has sued ConsumerInfo.com, an Experian company, over its use of the FreeCreditScore.com domain name.

Adaptive Marketing uses the domain names FreeScore.com and FreeTripleScore.com. You’re probably familiar with TV commercials for the latter domain, in which people are asked to say “Free Triple Score dot com” three times fast.

ConsumerInfo.com bought the FreeCreditScore.com domain name around October 2009, according to the suit, and then launched a $10-$15 million advertising campaign to promote the brand. It was a replacement for the company’s FreeCreditReport.com marketing push, popularized by a poorly singing rock band. (Incidentally, this change in branding might affect the value of CreditCheck.com and FreeCreditCheck.com, which sold for $3 million in 2007.)

Adaptive Marketing alleges that FreeCreditScore.com infringes on its marks for FreeScore.com and FreeTripleScore.com. Among Adaptive’s claims is that this violates the U.S. Anti-cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act.

This seems like a stretch, as “Free Credit Score” is a very generic term, and probably couldn’t be trademarked in its own right. “Free Score” and “Free Triple Score” are more distinctive since they don’t describe the service.

You can read the complaint here (pdf).

Coming soon, x.co URL shortener.

Domain name registrar GoDaddy is releasing a new URL shortener at x.co, according to a tweet by company founder and CEO Bob Parsons:

This is likely a .co “founder’s program” deal. .Co has already done a deal with Twitter for t.co, which will be Twitter’s own URL shortener services. .Co is Colombia’s country code top level domain name, which is currently being liberalized.

The domain registrar is one of ten accredited registrars for .co domain names, so it shouldn’t come as any surprise that it is upping the ante with registry .Co Internet.

Still, it will be interesting to see how GoDaddy positions the URL shortener. There are plenty of shorteners on the market, and Twitter will soon begin wrapping all links in t.co. It seems that the registrar will need to find a way to integrate the shortener into its other products to make it really gain traction. Many of the company’s employees currently use a .me shortener, and the .me registry is a partnership involving GoDaddy.

University loses fight for TexasSports.org.

I have to admit I’m a bit ashamed of my alma mater today. The University of Texas lost a UDRP case against Kevin Ham’s Vertical Axis for the domain name TexasSports.org.

The University’s official athletics site is TexasSports.com, and it was concerned that some people might type in .org instead of .com. This is plausible given that it’s a non-profit. TexasSports.com gets over 300,000 visits per month.

Still, the University made quite a stretch claiming trademark rights to the generic term “Texas Sports”. It based this claim on the University’s trademark to “Texas”. But, as Vertical Axis pointed out through attorney Ari Goldberger, this doesn’t give UT exclusive rights to anything attached to “Texas”, especially something generic.

I think a better strategy for UT’s attorney, William G. Barber, would have been to argue for some sort of common law rights in “Texas Sports”. That would still be a long shot, though.

While finding that the domain name wasn’t confusingly similar to UT’s mark, the panelist declined to find reverse domain name hijacking.

Barber has successfully brought many other UDRP claims on behalf of UT and Baylor University in Waco, Texas.