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Nominet considers publishing domain name drop lists

by — Expired Domains 0 Comments

Group wants to add sunshine to the domain-dropping process.

Picture of clock with words "expired domains"

.UK domain name registry Nominet is considering publishing drop lists of domain names that are about to be deleted and released. The organization is asking for feedback on the idea and two other issues during a policy consultation.

Nominet points to three issues with the way expired domains are currently handled.

First, only technically savvy people understand what’s dropping.

Second, companies and people that generate lists of expiring .uk domains tax Nominet’s infrastructure to get the data.

Finally, Nominet believes that people who might use the domains (as opposed to investing in them) are locked out of the process because they don’t have the savvy/awareness that investors have.

Nominet wants to know if people think it should provide drop lists to registrars, the public, or both. It also asks:

Do you think that Nominet should encourage competition in the .UK secondary domains market?

The organization is also looking for feedback on reducing the use of .UK domains in phishing attacks by explicitly allowing it to stop a domain from resolving if it believes it has a high risk of phishing use. It also is interested in implementing informational law enforcement landing pages when domains have been seized.

NameJet changes direct listing registrar to Network Solutions

by — Expired Domains 10 Comments

Change applies to non-expiring domains bought and sold on NameJet.

Network Solutions logoNameJet is changing the registrar it uses for “direct listing” sales from Enom to Network Solutions.

This means that people that list their non-expired inventory on NameJet will need to transfer the domains to Network Solutions upon sale. Buyers of these names will get the names at Network Solutions instead of Enom.

Inbound transfers to Network Solutions are available for $9.99, which is actually lower than Enom under its current pricing.

The change is due to Network Solutions’ parent company Web.com aquiring the 50% of NameJet that it didn’t own from Enom’s parent company Tucows.

Many domain investors look at Network Solutions as a “necessary evil” for  expired domains. The registrar has great inventory because of its age, but transferring domains out to a domainer-friendly registrar is painful; you cannot get authorization codes immediately and instead have to wait several days.

Be careful making bids in the new GoDaddy Investor app

by — Expired Domains 7 Comments

You might inadvertantly place a very high bid.

GoDaddy dropped its new iOS domain Investor app a couple of weeks ago. There aren’t a lot of new features yet, but it was completely rewritten under the hood for some new features coming soon.

There is a cautionary thing to note about the UI.

When you go to a domain name’s bidding screen, you’ll see the current bid price for the domain in the text entry box. You can tap “bid now” to bid that amount. The problem arrises when you want to make a proxy bid.

When you tap your finger in the text entry box, it doesn’t remove the number in the box. Instead, it appends whatever you type to the end of the minimum bid amount. In the example below, the minimum bid amount is $155. I tapped the box to enter $300, but as I typed it made it $155,300:

Screenshot from GoDaddy investor app

After I typed the number and tapped outside the box, this is what I saw:

GoDaddy investor app screenshot

I’ve caught myself several times before hitting the bid button, and I suspect someone (maybe even me) will accidentally submit a much higher bid than planned.

Although I no longer have the old app, I believe it removed the bid amount when you tapped in the text box. This is standard behavior for a number entry field like this.

I let GoDaddy know about this but think it’s worth a warning while it makes a change to its app.

 

Verisign gets domain backorder patent

by — Expired Domains 5 Comments

Schematic from a Verisign patent related to backordering domains. It shows registering an encoding domain that gives the right to register a domain upon its expiration.

A schematic from Verisign’s patent.

Last year I wrote about an intriguing patent application from Verisign (NASDAQ: VRSN), the company that runs the .com namespace. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has now issued patent #10404650 (pdf).

The patent describes ways to change up the expired patent game.

One way would be to issue encoding domain names that give people the right to buy a domain upon its expiration. For example, if you wanted to get the domain example.com when it expired on March 28, 2020, you could register the domain dn–example-20200328.com.

The right to register the domain upon expiration could be transferred to someone else by transferring the encoding domain.

Additional embodiments include allowing priority to register domains from a pool of domain names.

Some of Verisign’s patent applications seem to be geared to changing how expired domains are captured, and this could be one piece of the puzzle.

When I wrote about the instant patent when it was merely an application, I noted:

I had another thought about Verisign’s overall patent strategy while reading through this patent application. In 2013, Verisign discussed monetizing its patent portfolio. It has dropped that discussion (at least publicly). It would be a huge risk for Verisign to go after other registries while it works to hold onto its .com contract.

But…once is clears the Cooperative Agreement with the NTIA, one option would be to sell its portfolio to a group that grants a license back to it. That way Verisign can continue operating, get a profit from selling the patents, and be arm’s-length from any actions the buyer takes.

Verisign has now amended the Cooperative Agreement with the NTIA but is still working with ICANN to try to incorporate the .com price increase. It obviously won’t do anything drastic until then. Once it gets its way with price increases, it will have to consider how bold it wants to be. Does it want to hold out on rocking the boat as it pushes for price caps to eventually be eliminated?

To be continued…

This is a dirty way to use an expired domain

by — Expired Domains 14 Comments

A double amputee let his domain expire. Someone bought it for online gambling.

A screenshot of ScottRigsbyFoundation.org showing its use for online gambling

Not cool: the buyer of this expired domain re-purposed a site by a double amputee into an online gambling site.

Earlier this year, the domain name ScottRigsbyFoundation.org expired.

It was used by a double amputee who successfully competed in an Ironman Triathlon. These days he is also a motivational speaker.

The GoDaddy expired domain auction for the domain attracted multiple bidders and closed for $155 in February of this year.

The domain name itself doesn’t have much value to anyone other than the original registrant, but I’m sure it had some backlinks and good SEO. Some people buy expired domains for their SEO value and repurpose the website. I used to do this back in the mid-aughts.

But I’d never do something like this.

The domain buyer has apparently rebuilt the site as an online gambling information site. They even created a new logo calling it the Scott Rigsby Foundation.

That’s downright dirty. I couldn’t sleep at night if I did something like that.

Scott Rigsby is suing (pdf) over losing the domain, although I question the approach. He is suing GoDaddy in Georgia, claiming various parts of its contract aren’t valid and that he didn’t receive renewal notices for the domain.

I guess GoDaddy has money, but I don’t see this lawsuit going anywhere.

If the real goal is to get the domain back, Rigsby might do better by talking to a domain attorney who can walk him through options to get the domain either through a UDRP or via an in rem ACPA case in Virginia (assuming his claim that the registrant used false registration info is correct). I imagine he can easily show common law trademark rights in the term.