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Honeywell calls it quits on new top level domain name

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Company tells domain name overseer that it doesn’t want .Honeywell anymore.

Logo for Honeywell

American conglomerate Honeywell (NYSE: HON) has decided it doesn’t want to run its own top level domain name after all.

The company informed (pdf) ICANN last month that it wishes to terminate its agreement to run .honeywell as a top level domain name. The company never used the domain; the only second level domain name it registered under .Honeywell was the obligatory nic.honeywell.

.Honeywell was the only domain name the conglomerate applied for.

The company joins others that have belatedly decided they didn’t want to operate new top level domains, including McDonald’s and Emerson.

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ICANN proposes lifting price controls on .Org, .Info domains

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You might have to pay a lot more for your .org and .info domains in the future.

Image of dollar sign and upwards arrowDomain name overseer ICANN has proposed new contracts for the .Org and .Info registries that would eliminate price caps on the domain names. Under the terms of the new agreements, .Org operator Public Interest Registry and .Info operator Afilias could increase prices on registrations to an unlimited amount, provided that they give advance notice.

The terms are similar to those found in new top level domain name agreements that have resulted in some registry operators jacking up prices as much as 30x. While those cases were for little-used domains, .Org currently has 10 million domains under management.

In announcing the proposed contract, ICANN stated:

In alignment with the base registry agreement, the price cap provisions in the current .org agreement, which limited the price of registrations and allowable price increases for registrations, are removed from the .org renewal agreement. Protections for existing registrants will remain in place, in line with the base registry agreement. This change will not only allow the .org renewal agreement to better conform with the base registry agreement, but also takes into consideration the maturation of the domain name market and the goal of treating the Registry Operator equitably with registry operators of new gTLDs and other legacy gTLDs utilizing the base registry agreement

The protections for existing registrants are basically the right to renew their domains for up to 10 years in advance at current prices.

ICANN’s language will likely be cited by Verisign in future price increase requests.

The current contract allows Public Interest Registry and Afilias to increase wholesale prices by 10% per year.

ICANN also added Uniform Rapid Suspension to the contracts.

Both contracts are open to public comment until April 29: .Org comments .Info comments

Read more here

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The Mastermind created his own domain registrar to run his criminal enterprise

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Paul Le Roux found a workaround to domain name suspensions: create his own ICANN-accredited domain name registrar.

Book cover for The Mastermind about Paul Le RouxI just finished reading Evan Ratliff’s book The Mastermind about Paul Le Roux. Le Roux ran a lot of unsavory and illegal businesses starting with an online pharmacy business called RX Limited.

Le Roux used a lot of domain names to sell pills online to U.S. consumers. In addition to operating an illegal service, many of the sites were promoted with spam. He knew that domain registrars would terminate his domain names for doing this so he found a workaround: create his own ICANN-accredited domain name registrar.

Le Roux created domain name registrar ABSystems using someone else’s identity and registered his domains through the registrar.

ICANN terminated the registrar in 2013. ICANN works with another registrar to transfer domains when it shuts down a registrar. Registrars look at this as a way to grow their business; in this case, EnCirca got stuck holding a bag of bad domains.

The detectives who chased Le Roux used Whois and DomainTools to connect the dots.

The Mastermind is a fascinating book in which domain names play a large role.

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Some recent domain name observations

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These three domain names caught my attention in and around Austin.

Earlier this week I wrote about a bakery in Austin that uses an internationalized domain name so it can have an accent in its domain name. Here are a few other domains I’ve observed in the wild recently.

A four-letter, three-hyphen domain name

I’ve never seen so many hyphens crammed into such a short domain name before. While it looks OK, imagine telling someone to email you at n dash o dash v dash a dot com.

Picture of Nova van with domain n-o-v-a.com

.Church on a truck

Here’s a bumper sticker for a local church that uses Upwards.church for its domain name. .Church will never be a runaway moneymaker, but it’s a solid winner for Donuts. It has about 25,000 names in the zone.

Red truck with a bumper sticker for upwards.church

A flyer with a .Church

Here’s yet another church using a .church domain name. I received this flyer in the mail.

Flyer for dreamers.church

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Tim Berners-Lee sighs every time you sell a domain name

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WWW inventor discusses the web 30 years later, including his decision to operate it on the DNS.

Tim Berners-Lee

WWW inventor Tim Berners-Lee. Photo from World Wide Web Foundation.

The inventor of the World Wide Web must sigh a lot.

Speaking to The Guardian on the 30th anniversary of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee said:

Every time I hear that somebody has managed to acquire the [domain] name of their new enterprise for $50,000 (£38,500) instead of $500, I sigh, and feel that money’s not going to a good cause.

Berners-Lee told the Guardian that it’s a minor regret that came from his decision to build on top of the domain name system.

He continued:

You wanted a name for your website, you’d go and ask [American computer scientist] Jon Postel, you know, back in the day, and he would give you a name….

…At the time that seemed like a good idea, but it relied on it being managed benevolently…There are plenty of domain names to go around, but the way people have invested, in buying up domains that they think entrepreneurs or organisations will use – even trying to build AI that would guess what names people will want for their organisations, grabbing the domain name and then selling it to them for a ridiculous amount of money – that’s a breakage.

I’m sure Berners-Lee didn’t foresee this, but I’m also curious how he would have done it differently if he could go back in time. It’s also worth noting that there are many available domain names available across over 1,000 top level domains, so there’s no real shortage of web addresses that are freely available to register.

Berners-Lee also laments the creation of walled gardens such as apps and Facebook. They use the web platform, but web addresses are the key:

“So there’s web technology inside, but what we’re saying is if, from the user’s point of view, there’s no URL, then we’ve lost.”

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