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DigitalTown sells Appointment.com

by — Domain Sales 2 Comments

Company sold Appointment.com business earlier this month to unknown buyer.

DigitalTown sold Appointment.com earlier this month.

DigitalTown (OTC: DGTW) has sold its Appointment.com business.

The company disclosed the deal in its 10-Q filed yesterday. The SEC filing reveals little information about the transaction that occurred subsequent to quarter end:

“On October 9 2018, the Company sold its appointment.com division to an arms length third party.”

The domain was transferred to GoDaddy and has Whois privacy.

The 10-Q also provides details on how an investment the company received in May has fallen as cryptocurrencies have faced headwinds.

Catena Fund One, LP invested $1.659 million in the company in May in the form of 1.05 million RChain Coins (RHOC), which were valued at $1.58 USD. The company immediately started selling these coins for cash, but the price of RHOC started falling precipitously. In the second quarter of this year, the company sold what it had left for $518,181, which was $580,435 lower than the value when the cryptocurrency was received.

The move ended up being smart, though: RHOC currently trades for less than 20 cents.

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Donuts loses appeal in .Web case

by — Policy & Law 2 Comments

Court of Appeals agrees that covenant not to sue is valid.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth District has ruled against top level domain name company Donuts over the .Web domain name.

Donuts was one of the applicants for the .web domain name. Nu Dot Co won the auction for $135 million after Verisign (NASDAQ: VRSN) struck a deal with it to transfer the ICANN agreement for .web to it after the auction.

Donuts was upset that Nu Dot Co wouldn’t participate in a private auction for the domain name. Instead, Nu Dot Co pushed it to an ICANN “auction of last resort”. Had the auction been private, Donuts would have received about a $22.5 million payoff for losing.

Donuts went through ICANN’s normal appeals channels. When that failed, it sued ICANN in District court. The judge tossed out the suit because the application for new TLDs included a clause that the applicants would not sue ICANN. Donuts argued that this agreement not to sue is invalid.

The Appeals Court agreed with the lower court that the covenant not to sue was valid (pdf) in a decision published yesterday.

.Web still doesn’t have a green light, however. Afilias was the runner-up in the .Web auction and it is fighting the auction result through ICANN’s appeal processes.

While Donuts was upset about missing out on a payday by losing the auction, Afilias was upset that it didn’t win. Regardless of the outcome, both may benefit and get some satisfaction out of the delay they are causing Verisign. After all, Verisign did all it could to delay the launch of new top level domain names.

It will be interesting to see if Donuts’ strategy around .web changes when Akram Atallah takes over as CEO. Either way, Donuts’ fight against .web might be over. It will probably just hand the baton off to Afilias.

 

 

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BidPal hit for reverse domain name hijacking

by — Policy & Law 1 Comment

Company with a history of cybersquatting claims is found to have filed a case in abuse of the UDRP.

OneCause’s parent company has been found guilty of reverse domain name hijacking.

BidPal, Inc., a company that helps charities raise money under the name OneCause, has been found to have engaged in reverse domain name hijacking over the domain name OneCause.org. The company has a history with UDRP and cybersquatting challenges.

The company lost a UDRP it filed in 2012 to get the domain name BidPal.com. It then hired a new layer and filed a federal lawsuit in 2014 in another effort to get the domain. That suit was settled  and BidPal got the domain name.

Then, late last year the company filed a UDRP to get the domain name OneCause.com. The case was withdrawn and it appears the parties settled as BidPal now uses OneCause.com.

This year it filed a UDRP against OneCause.org, and it was for this case that the company was found to have filed the case in abuse of the policy.

The current domain owner registered the domain in 1999. BidPal didn’t file for a trademark until this year. It also inquired about buying the domain first. In other words, it was a classic Plan B reverse domain name hijacking case.

Panelist Fernando Triana wrote:

In the present case, the disputed domain name was registered in 1999, for Respondent to express to storage his documents, use the email service and maintain a blog, which was described to be his “one cause”.

Complainant registered its trademark in 2018 before the USPTO, and before the first use of the trademark, Complainant offered Respondent to buy the disputed domain name, thus, demonstrating knowledge of the previous existence of the disputed domain name.

Furthermore, Complainant failed to file any evidence concerning lack of rights or legitimate interest and bad faith.

Moreover, Complainant tried to confuse the Panel regarding Respondent’s bad faith, as the Complaint asserted that Respondent is profiting from Complainant’s reputation, which is not evidenced and probably nonexistent as the trademark ONECAUSE was recently registered.

This makes me wonder what the circumstances of the OneCause.com case were and what the settlement was.

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Sedo CEO Tobias Flaitz – DNW Podcast #206

by — Podcasts 5 Comments

Sedo’s CEO explains how the domain parking and domain sales business has performed so far in 2018.

dnw-podcastSedo CEO Tobias Flaitz is our guest this week. We discuss what’s happening in domain parking and the aftermarket, and he explains where the company gets most of its sales. We also discuss the international market for domains.

Also: Atallah likes Donuts, Uniregistry’s UnPerks, domains under USMCA, CrowdSignal, Web.com goes private and more.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 25:34 — 20.5MB) | Embed

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | Email | RSS

Subscribe via iTunes to listen to the Domain Name Wire podcast on your iPhone or iPad, view on Google Play Music, or click play above or download to begin listening. (Listen to previous podcasts here.)

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Div Turakhia hands over the reins of Media.net to Vaibhav Arya

by — Services 0 Comments

Turakhia steps aside at ad tech company he founded.

Vaibhav Arya has been named CEO of Media.net.

Div Turakhia, the billionaire co-founder of Directi and founder of ad tech company Media.net, is stepping down from the CEO role at Media.net. The company announced today that current CTO Vaibhav Arya has been promoted to CEO.

Turakhia founded the digital advertising company with knowledge and partnerships gained in the domain parking business. He turned this into an ad tech powerhouse that grossed $232 million in 2015. Shuzhi (formerly known as Miteno) bought the business for $900 million in 2016. (You can hear about Div’s journey and Media.net on DNW Podcast #139.)

After the acquisition, Turakhia stayed on in the CEO role while grooming his senior management team for a planned transition. Now, one of the people who has been with Media.net from the beginning is stepping up as CEO.

Arya has worked with Turakhia for a decade. While Arya has technically been the CTO, I know from my time working with Arya and Div at Media.net that Arya has a strong business acumen.

Turakhia has been appointed Strategic Advisor to the Shuzhi board.

Update: I have received a copy of the email Turakhia sent to the 1,300 employees of Media.net today. It is below.

Click here to continue reading…

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