A look at a few stories I haven’t covered this week…
There are a few notable stories in the domain name industry that I missed writing about over the past week, so here’s a quick run down.
A “monster” of an acquisition – Mesh Digital, which owns domain name registrar DomainMonster, has been acquired by Host Europe Group for an undisclosed sum. DomainMonster isn’t a huge registrar, but it has proven quite adept at mastering domain registrations when new top level domains enter their “general availability period”. This will come in handing with hundreds of TLDs coming on line in the next couple years.
iPhone5.com – Apple filed a UDRP to get iPhone5.com earlier this month. The owners put up an initial fight before deciding to hand the domain over the Apple this week.
Vanity.com – Quite a stink going on over at TheDomains about this UDRP filing. I hope there’s more to this story than meets the eye. For what it’s worth, the owner of the domain has had it since at least 2005. The company was formed in Nevada.
Louise says
Re: iPhone5 – more bad pubicity for domainers, as theNextWeb author explains, “Apple has sometimes taken its time to protect its trademarks by claiming domain names from squatters.” I visited the article, just to read the abuse commenters heep on investors, because of a few bad apples, no pun intended.
– Apple wins dispute over iPhone5.com domain name
I didn’t have to scroll that far, as the author, Matt Brian, disses domainers as, “squatters.”
Adam says
Damn, I use domainmonster as my main registrar because you get free privacy which more than makes up for the extra dollar you pay for registration. And I use webfusion (part of host europe) as one of my main hosting providers.
I have a rule that I never use the same company for both services. So now I have to choose which one to leave.
Andrew Allemann says
@ Adam – why are you opposed to using the same company for both domain registration and hosting?
Dave says
Maybe these are the wrong places to look but I’ve looked on wipo.int, icann.org and a few other sites and do not see any updates on the Vanity.com UDRP case since the story broke over a month ago.
Can anyone update on what’s going on with it?
There’s several businesses using the word vanity and In my opinion the word Vanity is a dictionary word that folks use all the time. If a business decides to put a commonly used dictionary word in their company name then it should be made clear by ICANN that they will be ruled against in a WIPO decision if they attempt to get the actual dictionary word.
Besides the actual meaning, there’s even vanity furniture, mirrors, domains and url’s. I hope if the case actually has to moves forward that the current owner or controller of Vanity.com wins.
funny says
Vanity.com UDRP case since the story broke over a month ago.
totally agree !!