Large European tech conference fails to obtain ideal domain name.

French tech conference LeWeb has lost a domain dispute with the owner of LeWeb.com.

The conference, which attracts 3,000 people, uses the domain name LeWeb.net.

Conference organizers claimed that many of its attendees reported confusion when they visited LeWeb.com by mistake. This is no surprise — typing .com instead of any other top level domain name is a common mistake.

The World Intellectual Property Organization panel denied the conference’s complaint, observing that LeWeb.com was registered well before the conference was founded. This would explain why it registered the .net version instead.

Another interesting note: LeWeb’s complaint says it has French trademarks for leweb2 leweb2.com leweb2.fr and leweb3 leweb3.com. It doesn’t appear to own any of these domains: leweb2.com, leweb2.fr, and leweb3.com.

Company repeats $5.00 offer starting this Friday.

Domain Name Registrar GoDaddy.com will be offering $5.00 .com domain names starting on Black Friday and running through CyberMonday (the following Monday). The company ran a similar promotion last year.

The deal appears to be an affiliate only offer, so I’m going to have to use an affiliate link to send you to it. The link will not give you the $5.00 price until Friday.

The price does not include ICANN’s 18 cent fee.

Update: I’ve also learned that Domain.com is currently offering $3.99 .COMs. This offer is good now and ends Monday, November 28. Customers may purchase up to 10 per account. No coupon is required and the price is automatically reduced at checkout.

Does anyone know of other domain name registrars jumping on the holiday shopping bandwagon with special Black Friday discounts?

Owner of domain names agrees to give domain names to Apple after company filed complaint.

Apple is now the proud owner of iphonesex4s.com and six other (mostly) explicit domain names.

The company filed a complaint with World Intellectual Property Forum against the owner of the seven domain names last month. All of the domain names forwarded to a mobile porn site when visited on a mobile device.

Apple terminated the case after the owner of the domains agreed to turn the domain names over. The whois record for the domains changed to brand protection company MarkMonitor today:

When the case was filed the domain ownership information was protected by whois privacy. This was later removed to disclose an Israeli company owned the domain names.

The seven domain names are:

iphonecamforce.com
iphonecam4s.com
iphoneporn4s.com
iphonesex4s.com
iphonexxxforce.com
iphone4s.com
porn4iphones.com

I wouldn’t expect Apple to resolve any of the domain names except for iPhone4s.com. [update: some readers have pointed out that the names still forward to the porn sites. The nameservers still point to the old source, so Apple/MarkMonitor need to change these ASAP.]

Ads promote new .xxx domain name option.

.XXX registry ICM Registry has launched a five week national TV ad campaign to promote the new domain name option.

The ads will start running this week and feature Gavin and his assistants, who go on quests to find out who is buying .xxx domain names. You can see one of the ad spots here. (Update: here’s a link to more commercials.)

ICM Registry also launched buy.xxx, a site to connect people to domain name registrars offering the new domain name. The site links to 64 domain name registrars offering the domains. Buy.xxx is featured in the TV commercials and other ad campaigns.

The .xxx landrush period ends on Friday. Landrush is open only to companies in the sponsored community (i.e. adult), so it will be a good test of community support for the domain name. The company received about 80,000 “sunrise” applications, but many of those were from companies outside the adult community that wanted to block their domains from registration.

Three additional parking companies added to domain rotation system.

Domain name parking optimization system Above.com has integrated three new parking companies into its platform: Voodoo, ParkingCrew, and TheParkingPlace.

It’s certainly interesting to see new parking companies pop up on the radar given all of the turmoil in industry; you could argue that these companies are appearing because of the challenges domainers face.

Voodoo and ParkingCrew use standard pay-per-click ads whereas TheParkingPlace uses primarily affiliate programs to monetize domain names. ParkingCrew is a new service from Team Internet GmbH out of Germany.

Above.com now has twenty parking services for which it says it can test domain names.