by Kevin Murphy

Indom, a medium-sized European domain name registrar, has been bought for €16.9 million ($22 million) in cash.

The buyer is Group NBT, an acquisitive British registrar holding company that already owns NetBenefit, NetNames, Easily.co.uk, Ascio and Envisional.

Indom, founded in 1999 focuses primarily on the French corporate market. It had revenue of €6.6 million ($8.7 million) in 2009, was slightly profitable, and is growing at 18% this year.

NBT said in a statement that customers will be migrated to NBT’s platform over a two-year period.

CEO of NBT, Geoff Wicks, said:

This transaction is of significant strategic importance for Group NBT and is precisely the type of acquisition we want to make. Not only does it provide scale in an important part of the European market which we will leverage in a number of ways, but it helps to cement our position ahead of our competitors in this attractive market.

The deal comes less than a week after Indom co-founder Stephane Van Gelder was elected chairman of the GNSO Council, ICANN’s major domain name policy-making committee, replacing VeriSign’s Chuck Gomes.

Kevin Murphy is a journalist covering domain names and writes the Domain Incite blog.

San Francisco event could be good for domainers — if they bring their professionalism.

Next up on the ICANN meeting schedule is meeting #40 in San Francisco.

Being the first U.S. meeting in a while, and since there will be some sort of TRAFFIC event immediately proceeding the event, you’re going to see a lot more domainers there than usual. This is a good thing as domain investors are generally underrepresented in just about everything that deals with ICANN.

But it could also backfire. A lot of people view domainers as unprofessional. This is deserved — I think it’s the single biggest threat to the industry.

I worry that domain investors will make their presence known at the meeting in a way that hurts their cause. Yelling and cussing aren’t going to get you anywhere with ICANN. Not understanding how the organization works and what it does will also be detrimental.

So here’s a call to domainers: go to San Francisco. But be professional. Learn about ICANN and what it does/doesn’t do. Understand its processes. Then bring a constructive and actionable agenda with you to the meeting.

I thought these guys were tech savvy?

A couple weeks after WikiLeaks.org’s DNS services provider cut if off, someone within the organization finally figured out how to log into the registrar account and change the DNS.

Seriously, was this just a ploy to get more publicity? When EveryDNS cut of WikiLeaks, all the organization had to do was log in to its Dynadot account and change the nameservers to another DNS or hosting service. Instead the domain name sat there…not resolving.

Finally, it appears that someone logged into the DynaDot registrar account and changed the nameservers. They currently point to Dynadot’s own nameservers, which may be set up with URL forwarding. The organization has had access to the registrar account all along.

Visiting WikiLeaks.org right now forwards me to WikiLeaks.info. Perhaps these guys are slow learners. WikiLeaks.info is registered with Go Daddy, a domain name registrar located in the good ole’ U.S.A. But I guess another mirror site is just a URL forward away.

Afternic and Sedo announce six figure sales.

Afternic has sold the domain name Decide.com for $175,000. The buyer appears to be someone associated with Seattle based PriceYeti. PriceYeti launched last year, offering to send users an email alert when the price of an item they were tracking online dropped. However, it appears the service is now offline. The whois records for PriceYeti and Decide.com are different, but Decide.com is registered under PriceYeti.

Elsewhere this week Sedo completed the sale of KF.com for $123,504. The company also brokered the sale of the active web hosting reviews site whreviews.com for $70,000 and sold the domain name VisitStockholm.com for $70,000 as well.

Here are Afternic’s reportable sales over $5,000:

decide.com $175,000.00
BubbleShooter.com $30,000.00
peddle.com $30,000.00
pronetwork.com $15,800.00
staffsource.com $13,000.00
tws.net $11,000.00
cellphonesearch.com $10,000.00
cureautism.com $10,000.00
MindfulBody.com $8,500.00
ezsave.com $8,000.00
MemoryFoamPillows.com $7,500.00
bizview.com $6,500.00
parksandresorts.com $6,300.00
augenkliniken.com $6,288.00
aifc.com $5,500.00
mycamo.com $5,500.00
smbm.com $5,400.00
notch.net $5,250.00
asphalttesting.com $5,000.00
gols.com $5,000.00
lotteryservice.com $5,000.00

Here are Sedo’s reportable sales over $5,000:

kf.com 123504 USD
whreviews.com 70000 USD
visitstockholm.com 70000 USD
helpful.com 50000 USD
younews.com 40000 USD
mph.com 27000 USD
suntana.com 19500 USD
spectrumanalyzer.com 15000 USD
americanproperty.com 13500 USD
cuisiner.com 13000 EUR
homefarming.com 12000 USD
izip.com 12000 USD
onetwotrip.com 8000 USD
baseballpins.com 8000 USD
illo.com 7500 EUR
engineeringschool.com 6500 USD
futuremakers.com 6500 USD
toyssale.com 6000 USD
epilierer.com 5900 EUR
hairvitamins.com 5600 USD
vncl.com 5350 USD
octopod.com 5001 USD
jeux-de-voiture.com 5000 EUR
ialbums.com 5000 USD
moviant.com 5000 USD
raceonusa.com 5000 USD
classical-music.com 5000 USD
brokery.com 5000 USD
findum.com 5000 USD
skyliving.com 5000 USD
albumphoto.fr 28106 EUR
friend.me 10099 USD
phonesystem.co.uk 8500 GBP
puro.it 5400 EUR
law.me 5000 USD
rentalcar.mx 5000 USD
autoline.de 4490 EUR
sixpack.net 12000 USD
credit.asia 7500 EUR
gratis.info 7500 USD
mydot.org 6000 USD

Company expands beta for listing syndication and fulfillment service.

SedoMLS, which syndicates your Sedo domain name listings across multiple sites and instantly transfers domain names upon purchase, is now available for select Sedo customers.

Sedo launched the service last year but it has been closed to most domainers. The new beta phase permits SedoPro customers to list domains at the MLS level. Other Sedo customers with 5,000 or more domain names may request access as well.

SedoMLS listings are syndicated to a number of partners, many of which enable domains to be sold and transferred instantly without seller involvement. Partners include Name.com, InternetX, and DirectNIC.

The system is a competitor to AfternicDLS. AfternicDLS has a number of large registrars already in its stable including Network Solutions, Register.com, and Name.com. eNom and Moniker will be added before the end of the year.

Despite not having the same major registrar distribution as AfternicDLS, Sedo may be able play to its strength in the international market. The company has a leg up on Afternic for selling ccTLDs and foreign language domain names.