Hundreds of .eu domains being auctioned at no reserve.

About 400 .eu domain names are up for grabs on Sedo today, all at no reserve. The auctions end starting at 12 pm EDT.

Some of the top keyword domains include Gin.eu, treasure.eu, soda.eu, junk.eu, razor.eu, sociology.eu, labor.eu, repair.eu, dermatology.eu, easter.eu, and horoscopes.eu.

There are also many 3 and 4 letter domains.

So far the auction looks more like a .ws auction than .eu given the prices — not a single domain has been bid above 310 EUR at the time I write this. It might be a buying opportunity for any .eu fans out there.

Here are the links to the two separate .eu auctions:

Auction 1

Auction 2

Founding chair of ICANN’s board says new TLDs are a waste of money.

On the way into work this morning I heard yet another report about new top level domain names, this time on NPR.

The report interviewed Esther Dyson. Among her many experiences was being the founding chairwoman of ICANN.

So what did she have to say about new top level domain names?

“I think it’s kind of a useless market,” she says, “and if I had $185,000, I’d spend it on something else.”

… “Nobody’s creating new value here,” Dyson says, “They’re just selling words.”

Ouch.

The story also interviews Forrester analyst Jeff Ernst. Ernst gives an example of how new TLDs enable innovation for brands:

So not only is Canon now going to be dot-Canon,” he says, “but Canon can now issue secondary domains to every one of its camera owners, and what they might very well do is embed a chip in their cameras that link that camera owner to their ID so that as they’re taking photos they could just be automatically uploading photos to a photo-sharing site. I mean, that’s just one possibility.”

Yes, it’s a possibility. In fact, it’s possible today with the plain old Canon.com domain name. It would just be at the third level instead of the second. (And in fact, that would be a lot cheaper since Canon will have to pay 25 cents to ICANN for each second level domain it registers. Third level name.canon.com domains? Those are free.)

What does Dyson have to say about .canon?

“Canon.com works fine, as far as I’m concerned.”

I wouldn’t discourage a brand from applying for a top level domain name. The price is peanuts to a big company. But let’s not pretend examples like this — which I hear over and over — are something that is only enabled with the introduction of new TLDs.

Will there be innovation with new TLDs? It’s entirely possible. I just hate to hear examples of innovation that aren’t innovative.

Company loses case for MonkeySays.com.

A company that sells t-shirts and tote bags emblazoned with the saying “Monkey Says” has lost its attempt to grab the domain name MonkeySays.com through a UDRP case.

Monkey-Says, LLC, which owns the domain names monkey-says.com and monkeysays.net tried to upgrade its domain with the help of National Arbitration Forum. But the one person panel denied it.

The company clearly knew the owner of MonkeySays.com registered the domain years before it started using its trademark. After all, the company registered monkeysays.net because the .com wasn’t available. Still, it argued that the respondent registered the domain in bad faith because he renewed it.

The panel wasn’t having any of those arguments, writing:

This Panel agrees with Respondent in the fact that Respondent could not possibly have had the purpose of disrupting the business that would not exist for years into the future.

Monkey-Says, LLC was represented by Daniel J. Holmander of Barlow, Josephs & Holmes Ltd.

If .brand TLDs work, the incumbents will win.

I don’t think opening the floodgates to new top level domain names will have a monumental impact on the web, especially for brands that want to register a .brand domain name.

But let’s assume for a moment that it does. Let’s also assume that companies are able to leverage their .brand domain names in a way that gives them a competitive advantage; whether it be against cybersquatting, in search engines, or for marketing.

That’s what ICANN hopes will happen. But it would be terrible for the web.

What we’d have is a group of haves and have nots. The haves would be large companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter, which can afford the hundreds of thousands of dollars to get their own TLD. The have nots would be everyone else.

One of the beauties of the web is how little money it takes to start up a web site or business. A $10 domain, free software, and a cheap web hosting package gets you started.

But if new TLDs succeed that may no longer be the case. The next company that wants to take on Google’s dominant position in search or Facebook’s leadership in social networking will be at an instant disadvantage.

Sure, some day you might be able to register your own TLD for $10. Yet that’s a long way off.

Company picked up Cars2.com after it expired.

I’ve written a number of articles recently about movie studios not aggressively pursuing domain names for their movies.

But Disney’s Pixar does own Cars2.com as it prepares to launch the sequel to its hit Cars in theaters this week.

Did Disney pay big bucks to acquire the domain name? Nope. It got it after it expired.

The domain name was registered way back in 1998. A Virginia man owned the domain name until the middle of 2008 when it appears to have expired. That’s when Disney picked it up.

But that’s where Disney’s luck runs out. Cars3.com is already registered to someone using a whois proxy service.