Three hackers indicted for hijacking domain name.

An indictment against three hackers involved in hijacking the Comcast.net domain name last year shows how easy it is to pull it off: just get access to the administrative contact’s email address.

The U.S. government has charged three hackers with doing just that, and using the email address to change the nameservers on Comcast.net at domain name registrar Network Solutions.

Blame the hackers, but also Comcast for not having security measures in place with their registrar. Moniker, Fabulous, and GoDaddy each have optional security tools available that make it harder to make changes to DNS.

If I were a registrar, I’d offer a gold standard security measure to big companies for critical domains. It would be expensive — something like $10,000 a year — but would guarantee that incidents like this don’t happen.

In order to make any change to the DNS or ownership of a domain, a representative of the registrar would literally fly to the headquarters of the company to meet in person. Over the top? I don’t think so. If I were the CTO of a Fortune 500 company, I’d gladly pay this amount as an insurance policy.

.Cm domain name registry NETCOM loses financial files.

The “relaunch” of Cameroon’s .cm domain name stuttered out of the gate after many technical difficulties. Apparently those problems continue, and it highlights one of the risks of buying certain country code domain names.

.Cm registry NETCOM has emailed its registrars informing them of data loss in its accounting systems, and admitting it didn’t have a data backup plan in place:

Dear Registrars,

our accounting system suffered a major problem, due to a power surge, which destroyed the harddrives. Unfortunately our accounting department didn’t backup the data properly before the incident.

We have sent the harddrives to a data recovery specialist, but we are unsure if the data can be restored and if so to what extend.

In order for us to get back on track quickly, we would highly appreciate if you could send us the invoice files as well as the domain detail files, which we have sent to you in the past.

Please send to [email address removed]

Your clients domain data has not been affected by this. We keep various backups of the domain and registrant data.

We like to thank your for your support in this matter.

Best regards,

Moustapha Saya Kaigama
CEO – Netcom.cm Sarl

.Cm’s launch was delayed after Council of Country Code Administrators (COCCA) felt the registry was not ready. To move ahead with the launch, NETCOM decided to run the registry software on its own software rather than with COCCA. .Cm registrants should hope that NETCOM actually has sufficient “various backups” in place for its registrant data.

Tucows reports stable revenue and increase in brandable domain sales.

Tucows today reported earnings of $.07 per share for the third quarter, compared to a loss of less than a penny per share in the same quarter last year. The company benefited from income from its final receipt for selling its stake in domain name registry Afilias, as well as from foreign exchange gains. Revenue held essentially steady compared to last year.

On its investor conference call today, Tucows CEO Elliot Noss reported strong sales of “brandable” domains through its YummyNames division. The company sold about $250,000 worth of these domains, on top of direct navigation domain sales. The total YummyNames take for the quarter was $1.782 million including parking revenue.

The company doesn’t expect as much revenue from direct navigation sales in the future because it has cleared out a backlog. It has a regular agreement to sell about $100,000 worth of expired direct navigation domains every month or two, Noss explained.

Noss also alluded to a future partnership with NameMedia to list brandable domains for sale:

The number of brandable domain name transactions has shown great progress through September and continue to accelerate in October. We expect this to be helped further as we finalize the deal to list our domains in the BuyDomains.com and Afternic.com market places and distribution networks, which we view as the best buy now marketplaces in the secondary market.

When adding expired domains to its portfolio, Tucows plans to focus on the brandable name segment going forward:

…So over the couple of few years that we were sort of taking the [exit] from our expiry stream, we built up a bit of a backlog of those direct navigation names and you remember those are the names that are really valued on a multiple of revenue based on their traffic, not for in any way their value to a company who might want to name themselves or use the name line of business and we are really focused on those brandable names.

Considering .asia and .tel results, how many domains can a new TLD expect to register?

What makes a top level domain name successful?

If you compare any top level domain to .com, they are all failures. But if you look at it from the registry’s perspective, the number required to be profitable isn’t that much.

.Biz brings in about $12 million a year to registry Neustar even though .biz is only tiny sliver of the domain market at two million domains. That’s not bad.

I’ve been told that some business plans for new top level domains anticipate registration levels of only about 35,000. That’s not much, and I suspect many general domains can get that many registrations in defensive registrations alone. But if it’s marketed to a niche community, that can be profitable.

So let’s look at numbers for a couple recent top level domains, .asia and .tel (I’ve already written about .mobi).

In its latest public ICANN report, .tel registry Telnic reported a total of 221,616 domains registered in July. The number seems to be growing 5,000-15,000 names a month. Recent estimates I’ve heard are that there are about 250,000 .tel domains registered, which jives with the current growth rate. But keep in mind .tel will take a hit after initial registration periods lapse.

.Asia has already seen its first round of drops from its land rush, and is now hovering at about 215,000 domains registered.

Neither of these TLDs faced intense competition when they were launched, and they are also fairly generic in nature. When new TLDs are launched en masse, they’ll face stiff competition with other similar TLDs. That means they’ll be lucky to approach the numbers .asia and .tel have, unless they manage to score good shelf space at a registrar like GoDaddy (or are launched by a registrar for that matter).

I’ve never had a first hand look at a business plan for a new TLD, but I hope their backers are being cautious with their forecasts.

Registered base of .mobi domains is sinking.

The total number of .mobi domain names registered fell to 850,712 in July 2009, the latest number available through ICANN. That represents a 10% drop from the same month in 2008 when the total base was 946,357.

The number of .mobi domains registered has held stagnate this year, hanging around 850,000 domains.

.Mobi has been one of the best marketed new top level domain names to ever be released. A couple months ago I was surprised to see people calling out mTLD for not promoting the domain more. I suspect these people are more frustrated about resale values of the domain than mTLD’s marketing. mTLD has marketed the heck out of the domain, released software to support domain registrants, hooked up with GoDaddy (which has registered about half of all .mobi domains) and forged alliances with mobile device makers.

That said, it looks like 850,000 may be the ongoing magic number for .mobi domain registrations. A lot of people bought .mobi domain names for speculation, and with the resale market faltering, it’s unlikely to see a surge in new registrations for the domain.

Later today I’ll post numbers from .asia and .tel to show how those domains are performing.

[Update: as one reader pointed out, .mobi got a boost of about 100,000 domains recently with the launch of certain IDN domains. See comments.]