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Facebook sues Web.com’s NVSC for cybersquatting

by — Policy & Law 0 Comments

Social media company alleges that Web.com subsidiary owns 74 infringing domain names.

An image of justice with scales and the words "lawsuits"

Facebook has filed a lawsuit (pdf) against New Ventures Services Corp (NVSC) for alleged cybersquatting of its brands, including Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.

NVSC is a Web.com subsidiary that holds domain names for traffic revenue and resale. It gets many of its domain names by cherry-picking expiring domain names from Web.com registrars, including Register.com and Network Solutions. (Web.com was acquired by a new entity called Newfold Digital earlier this year.)

Facebook alleges that NVCS holds at least 74 domain names that infringe its marks, including FacebookBusinessLeads .com, Instagram-Online .com and InstallWhatsApp .com.

Many of these domains are parked with links to a Network Solutions page where the domains can be purchased for as little as $300.

Last year, Facebook sued domain name registrar Namecheap and its proxy service in a cybersquatting suit. In that case, Facebook alleges that Namecheap customers registered infringing domain names.

Angel.com domain name sells for $2 million

by — Domain Sales 10 Comments

Sedo broker Dave Evanson brokers megadeal.

Price tag image with price and "Sold!"

Sedo domain name broker Dave Evanson announced today that he brokered the sale of Angel.com for $2 million:

Based on historical Whois records from DomainTools, the seller is Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories, Inc. Genesys acquired teleco company Angel.com in 2013 and rebranded the product as Genesys Premier Edition.

The domain is currently pending transfer at the domain name registrar CSC.

The buyer is not yet known, but one prospective buyer is AngelList. It uses the domain Angel.co. [Update: the domain name forwards to Angel Studios, a group with crowdfunding platform for movies and other entertainment.]

This is the second public seven-figure sale of the year. Last year there was one public seven figure sale (Bullish.com for $1.08 million).

Security company Proofpoint files for reverse Whois patent

by — Services 3 Comments

Proofpoint wants a patent for its domain discovery system.

A figure from a Proofpoint patent application showing a reverse Whois lookup

A figure from Proofpoint’s patent application showing reverse Whois data.

Cybersecurity company Proofpoint (NASDAQ: PFPT) has filed a patent application (pdf) for a reverse Whois system.

Reverse Whois refers to finding all of the domain names associated with a given owner. A typical reverse Whois lookup involves using an email address or Registrant Name in Whois and discovering the domain names associated with it.

Proofpoint’s system is designed to start with a seed domain name owned by a company. It then runs reverse Whois checks on the Whois data and infrastructure around the domain name. It uses what data is available to try to determine all of the domains owned by the same entity.

If the domain uses Whois privacy, it will look at the domain’s infrastructure (name servers, IP addresses, MX records, etc.). The system can use a combination of data to try to ascertain which domains belong to the entity.

One goal of a system like this is to determine when a bad actor registers a brand domain.

The system sounds a lot like some of the tools that DomainTools offers.

Proofpoint filed the original patent application (Ser. No. 16/244,955) in January 2019 and filed a continuation patent application (Ser. No. 17/129804) in December 2020. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office published the continuation application today.

 

Sizing the domain name aftermarket

by — Uncategorized 6 Comments

Please provide me with data to estimate the size of the domain name aftermarket.

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How big is the domain name aftermarket? How much dollar volume of domain names sell on the aftermarket each year?

It’s a challenging question to answer, which is why estimates vary widely. It’s hard to come up with accurate numbers when the inputs are hard to come by. Most large domain investors are privately held. Those that are publicly held offer many services and don’t break out aftermarket sales.

A recent Boston Consulting Group study estimates that 1.25 million domains changed hands in the aftermarket last year and that domain investors own 27.7 million .com domains. That implies a 4.5% sell-through rate (assuming we’re just looking at .com), which is well above what domain investors achieve. Based on the methodology, it’s possible that the study also considers expired domain sales, which might account for the high sale rate, but then the average sales price in the study is too high.

With this in mind, I’m going to explore piecing together how big the domain aftermarket is. It will be challenging and I’d like your help. Please send me any data you think might be helpful. This includes data you have captured about the largest domain investors, or your own data if you have a large portfolio or operate a service that captures domain data. I will keep data sources confidential and will only present information in aggregate.

Bloomberg writes about Nick Lim and Epik

by — Domain Registrars 57 Comments

Bloomberg publishes a story about Nick Lim, who sold BitMitigate to Epik. 

Cover of Bloomberg profile of Nick Lim

Bloomberg Businessweek cover

Bloomberg has published a profile of Nick Lim, who sold his company BitMitigate to Epik in 2019.

Lim has since left Epik but remains a shareholder. He now spends his time helping sites favored by White supremacists and QAnon followers stay online.

It’s a fascinating story about the 23-year-old who says he is motivated by free speech. Authors William Turton and Joshua Brustein dig into Lim’s background, finding some contradictions in his story.

The story also discusses Epik and Rob Monster. Bloomberg discusses how the company provides services to extremist sites and provides this nugget:

In October, Bloomberg Businessweek emailed Monster, requesting an interview to discuss Epik’s political philosophy and its relationship with Lim. [Rob] Davis, the Epik executive, sent a nine-page response arguing that Epik had been demonized unfairly and had done a great job of combating extremism. Davis accused the news media of trying to destroy the lives of Epik employees and said the interview request itself was part of an attempt to manipulate the 2020 presidential election. “The long and short of it,” he wrote, “is that we don’t give interviews to traitors of our country that participate in attempted coups sponsored by offshore money.” He cc’d close to 100 other recipients, including the Republican chair of the Federal Communications Commission, the antitrust division of the Federal Trade Commission, and Fox News host Sean Hannity.

This will sound familiar to anyone who has received an email from Davis. When PayPal dropped Epik, Davis wrote an open letter mentioning Hollywood pedophiles and Hunter Biden. When GoDaddy terminated its Afternic partnership with Epik, Epik questioned receiving GoDaddy’s letter “two hours after the election was called for Joe Biden.”

And when some domain name investors reacted to an ostensibly racist comment by an Epik representative, Davis sent an email cc’d to the FTC telling people to stop, threatening that he could email 300 million people within 15 seconds.

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