Suit claims registrar parked trademarked domain names for the period between expiration and deletion.

Verizon has a filed a lawsuit (pdf) against domain name registrar DirectNIC and related companies, alleging that the defendants parked expired domain names infringing on Verizon’s trademarks in the period between expiration and deletion.

The lawsuit also names directors of DirectNIC and related companies as defendants, and uses a gripe site and UDRP decisions as part of the basis for linking together the company with a number of other entities, which the suit calls “shell companies”.

Verizon claims that the defendants have registered 288 domain names that infringe on its marks. But the crux of its argument is that DirectNIC became, in effect, the registrant of these domain names for the period between when the domain names expired and were deleted. The Verizon lawsuit also claims that the defendants then transferred some of these expired domains to other entities for a fee prior to deletion.

Most major registrars replace the whois information for expired domain names with their own information or domain privacy, and often times display some sort of message about the domain being expired. During this period, the registrar places a parked page on the domain name. The domains are later auctioned off or transferred to other entities.

For example, Network Solutions places a notice and parked page on expired domain names. It then sends the domain name to an auction on NameJet. If there’s a buyer, the domain is then transferred to the new owner. Some domain registrars also have deals with buyers to sell domains to them outside of the auction process.

It’s not clear why Verizon sued DirectNIC and related other companies rather than a competitor. Verizon makes a lot of allegations in the lawsuit linking the defendants together, even though the point of the lawsuit doesn’t seem to address these linked entities and instead goes after the practice of parking expired domain names.

Depending on the outcome, this suit could have ramifications for most major domain name registrars and their expired domain parking practices, let alone “coming soon” placeholder pages.

Data mining could identify problem registrars before it’s too late.

It’s always a headache when an ICANN-accredited domain name registrar loses its accreditation. But often times that’s just the beginning, as customers of Parava Networks learned last year.

Parava was allegedly bilking its customers by accepting payments for multi-year renewals, and then only renewing the domain names a year at a time.

This becomes fairly evident when you look at VeriSign’s monthly registrar reports. Without doing a statistical analysis, you’ll still see that Parava has an higher percentage of one year renewals vs. longer term renewals when compared to other registrars.

In order to prevent the next Parava, RegisterFly, etc., ICANN should mine these reports for anomalies. Of course, you need to take into consideration some registrars that are owned by domain investors. They’re likely to renew a year at a time.

But retail registrars should have a fairly consistent percentage across all type of registrations. If not, ICANN should flag the registrars and see if it can understand why. Is it because the registrar doesn’t promote multi-year renewals, or doesn’t offer a price break?

Either way, I’d love to see a statistician analyze this information for any red flags. It would save a lot of heartache in the future.

Reviewing the numbers behind DomainMonster’s claim.

Yesterday domain name registrar DomainMonster.com sent out a press release “UK Company Confirmed as World’s Largest New Domain Name Supplier“. According to the release,

Measured by the largest number of domains registered in the first month of public door opening at a domain registry, the closest retail competitor was US based Go-Daddy, some 36% behind Domainmonster.com.

It may come as a surprise that a relatively unknown domain name registrar topped Go Daddy by such a large margin. I think we should run this one through analysis like those political fact-checking sites.

There have basically been two gTLD launches in the past two years: .asia and .tel. The first gotcha is that Go Daddy doesn’t offer .tel domain names, so that gives DomainMonster a leg up to begin with. The second is that the data is limited to just one month after the launch of the new domains.

I can’t get my numbers to match up with the company’s 36% lead over Go Daddy, but looking into the numbers shows that the stat is misleading.

First for .Tel. As I said, Go Daddy doesn’t offer .tel, so it’s number is 0. I’m not sure which month DomainMonster used for its .tel data. But in April 2009, which I believe is the first month after general availability of .tel, its parent company Mesh Digital registered 3,675 .tel domain names. In March they registered 10,938. (I’m assuming the company only has one accredited registrar.)

For the other gTLD launch, .asia, Go Daddy outsold DomainMonster 2 or 3x each month around the launch. In April 2008, Go Daddy sold 10,728 .asia domain names through GoDaddy.com and its reseller program, compared to 4,051 for DomainMonster. March and May numbers have a similar ratio between the two companies.

If you look at how many .asia domains the companies sold during the first calendar year, Go Daddy outsold Domain Monster 3-to-1.

So from a fact-check standpoint, the press release lands somewhere in the middle: technically true, but misleading.

That’s not to say DomainMonster.com is a bad company. On the contrary, they have done a great job teaming up with registries as they launch new TLDs. You may have seen their booth at one of the many domain conferences.

But if you want to know which company will sell more of a new TLD head-to-head, put your money on those guys in Scottsdale.

Go Daddy set to hit another milestone.

[Update: Go Daddy hit the milestone earlier today.] About six months after crossing the 30 million domain name mark, The Go Daddy Group is set to surpass 40 million domains under management, most likely on Wednesday. So if you register a domain name tomorrow, you might get some extra notoriety if you time it just right.

Ten years ago there were only about 17 million domain names registered, and now there is a single registrar with more than twice that many domains under management. When you do the math, it’s no surprise the company grossed about $750 million last year.

It was on March 10, 2000, coincidentally the same day Go Daddy is likely to hit 40 million domains under management, that the .com bubble is generally thought of to have “burst”, with the NASDAQ topping out at 5132.52. In the period that followed, many people and companies let their domain names expire. It was during this time that the domain name gold rush caught its second wind.

Network Solutions was the biggest registrar at the time. Ten years later it has only about 6.5 million domain names under its umbrella.

Given the role Go Daddy played in bringing domain names to the mass market, I’m somewhat surprised it wasn’t nominated to The .Com 25. But rather than look at the past, I’m sure the company has its eyes on a bigger milestone: 50 million domains under management. At this pace, it could hit that number later this year.

Company files patent application for cross-selling business cards based on registrant information.

The Go Daddy Group, parent company of domain name registrar GoDaddy, has filed two patent applications related to ordering business cards along with a domain name registration.

U.S. patent applications 12/202919 (pdf) and 12/202956 (pdf) describe a method of using information collected during the domain name registration process to help generate — and cross-sell — business cards for the registrant. These business cards could be offered as printed cards, an electronic file that may be printed, or as an electronic-only business card.

It makes sense to offer business cards to people when they register a domain name. After all, many people registering a domain are starting a business, and you’ve already collected their contact information (and now have a URL to put on the card). But I wonder how Go Daddy’s invention compares to other companies that collect information to sell one good and cross-sell another. VistaPrint, one of the masters of cross-selling, often uses customer information gained from selling one print or electronic product to sell another to the same customer.

The patent applications were filed September 2, 2008 an published today.