CEO to step down at end of three year tenure.

ICANN President and CEO Rod Beckstrom will step down at the end of his three year term, the non-profit announced this afternoon.

He has been at the helm of the company since July 2009 and will finish his three year contract at the end of June 2012.

It’s been an interesting couple years since he joined the organization. Shortly after he started ICANN gained some independence from the U.S. government. But the relationship with the U.S. government has been sour as the group pushes forward with new top level domain names.

In an official press release, Beckstrom said:

“I can summarize my time here in four words: strong execution, great teambuilding,” he said. “We have built a world-class executive team, and elevated ICANN’s stature through strategic relationships with governments, businesses, top technology firms and international organizations.”

But Beckstrom’s tenture may be as controversial as the organization itself.

In June former ICANN staffer Kieren McCarthy wrote a post titled “Has ICANN already fired Rod Beckstrom?” that summarizes at least one view of Beckstrom.

Of course, ICANN is one of those punching bags that no one ever really likes. I didn’t hear a lot of positive talk about the previous CEO, either.

The announcement nearly a year in advance does seems a bit early, but it should give the group more time to recruit its next leader.

Reduce your commission rate by changing your price.

Last week I sold a domain through GoDaddy Premium Listings for $1,750. I’m happy with the sale, although is stings to pay a $525 commission.

A couple weeks ago Adam Strong noted that GoDaddy reduced its fee on Premium Listings sales from 30% to 20%, but only on listings created in August. He suggested deleting and re-adding domains to take advantage of the lower commission rate. For the domain I just sold it would have saved me $175 in commissions.

One of my readers emailed me about an easier way to reduce your commission rate from 30% to 20%. Instead of deleting and re-adding a listing, you can just change the price. This changes the rate to 20%.

This is easy to do by editing each domain name. But if you have a lot of domains on the system this is too time consuming.

I found that you can do a bulk edit fairly easily once you know where to look.

1. Go to Tools > Exportable Lists

2. Click “Add New Export”

3. Choose “Premium Listings” from the drop down and click “Next”

4. Check the box for “List Price” and click “Next”

Now you have a .csv of all of your listings and prices. Open the .csv.

5. Change the columns to the format domain, price (you may need to use the “concatenate” function)

6. Change your prices on each domain

7. Copy the list

8. Go Buy/Sell > Premium Listings

9. Click “Advanced Edit” and paste the list, hit “OK”

I found the Advanced Edit feature to freeze if you input a lot of domains, so you might need to do them in batches.

I suppose a friendly account rep might be able to bulk change the prices for you, too.

Hat tip: Joshua

Registry has ambitious plans for letting web surfers know it exists.

With the first .xxx domain names from the “Founder’s” program coming online and the trademark sunrise period soon to get underway, .XXX backer ICM Registry has some very ambitious marketing plans.

I caught up with ICM Registry CEO Stuart Lawley today to understand the latest on .xxx and the company’s marketing plans.

Ambitious Marketing

One of the striking differences between .xxx and new TLD launches of a decade ago is how much the registry plans to spend informing the world that .xxx exists. The company will spend $3 million promoting .xxx before the end of the year and budgets $15 million for the first year alone to reach web users.

“I haven’t seen many registries do that,” said Lawley. “They pump the names to people to try to register them. We’re advertising to users.”

The message to users is that .xxx exists and is “safe” (thanks to a virus scanner deal for all .xxx sites), so people looking for adult material can just enter a term followed by .xxx to find what they’re looking for.

The registry is also sacrificing what would surely be a big payday — selling porn.xxx and sex.xxx – to use the sites as search engines for .xxx domain names. ICM Registry wants these sites to become traffic generators for registrants and is spending seven figures on this effort.

Rights Protection

But the registry isn’t just promoting the domains to users. Lawley said his company has spent $1 million promoting its sunrise periods to trademark holders. It will also offer a lifetime blocking service for non-adult companies. The registry price for this service is $165 and the company is operating it on a cost recovery basis. It guesstimates 10,000 domains will be “blocked” using the service.

“We’ve done our job to promote sunrise,” said Lawley. “No one can say ‘I wasn’t aware of this’”.

As for Free Speech Coalition’s continued challenges to .xxx — including providing a template letter to put the registry on notice of trademark infringement — Lawley says the company’s position is clear. It has published a white paper on trademarks and registry responsibility.

Just because a company has a registered trademark doesn’t mean it’s the only company to have rights to a domain. For example, one company could have a term registered with the U.S. while another is registered elsewhere and both companies compete.

“I think ICM’s rights protection mechanisms are stronger and better than any top level domain launched to date,” he said.

Software Compatibility and New TLD Challenges

.XXX is already getting indexed in search engines such as Google and Yahoo. But it will take a while longer for some software developers to recognize it as a top level domain.

A number of software programs don’t recognize .xxx yet. ICM is working with companies such as Skype and Google to address these issues.

This is an issue I’ve been writing about for years. New TLD operators will need to watch ICM’s launch to understand some of the challenges they’ll face.

Up Next

Sunrise for trademark holders kicks off September 7. Sunrise A is for adult site trademark holders, Sunrise B is for non-adult companies wishing to block their names from resolving.

German company goes after three letter domain 16 years after it’s registered.

I’ve seen a lot of egregious UDRP cases over the years. This one may take the cake.

Imagine the year is 1995. You register the domain name GEA.com because your personal initials are GEA and you have a business called G.E.A. Design.

Then 14 years later, in 2009, a German company starts complaining that its acronym is GEA and you should sell it the domain name for a nominal amount so it can upgrade its web address from GEAGroup.com. When you refuse, a couple years later — 16 years after you registered the domain name — the company files a UDRP against you.

That’s exactly what happened when GEA Group Aktiengesellschaft filed a case against a California man this year.

The WIPO panelist sums up the bad faith argument fairly nicely:

The Complainant’s suggestion that the Respondent’s failure to display content on the website since 2007 would somehow confuse Internet users is not in the Panel’s view credible. In addition the Panel notes that the Respondent has apparently refused numerous offers for sale of the Disputed Domain Name from various organizations, including from the Complainant, on the legitimate basis that it has used its email address from this website for many years and that to sell it and to have to change email addresses would cause the Respondent considerable disruption and inconvenience. In these circumstances the suggestion by the Complainant of its impression, based on its lawyers’ communications with the Respondent in 2009, that the Respondent would be prepared to sell the Disputed Domain Name for a substantial multiple of the USD 2,000 sum offered by the Complainant, carries little weight.

Overall, the Panel’s view that the Disputed Domain Name has not been registered or used by the Respondent in bad faith is only reinforced by the delay of the Complainant in acting to obtain the Disputed Domain Name. Had the Complainant really been concerned about the Respondent’s illegitimate motives or about damage to its reputation it would not have waited so long after the initial registration in 1995 of the Disputed Domain Name to first communicate with the Respondent (the first communication with the Respondent by the Complainant’s lawyers appears to have occurred in 2009) and a total of 16 years to bring this Complaint.

Needless to say, the panel ruled that the domain owner can keep the domain name. But he should have also found GEA Group Aktiengesellschaft guilty of reverse domain name hijacking.

Republican presidential candidate could have easily gotten his .com domain name.

Over the weekend Texas governor Rick Perry confirmed what a lot of us already knew: he’s running for president in 2012.

Perry’s official web site is RickPerry.org, which makes sense.

But unfortunately for Perry, he doesn’t own RickPerry.com. Even more unfortunate is that he could have easily acquired the domain name last year.

As I wrote in May of 2010, the domain name RickPerry.com had expired. The domain name was previously owned by an outfit called “campaignweb”, which had forwarded the domain to RickPerry.org.

Someone from Rick Perry’s office viewed the story I wrote about the expired domain. Yet they didn’t do anything about it. Instead, someone from Mexico registered the domain name. According to a Domain Name Wire reader, the buyer paid $2,100 to get the domain name in an expired domain auction at NameJet.

The domain name currently doesn’t resolve, but you can bet a lot of traffic is hitting it.

Photo from RickPerry.org.