Domain Name Wire | Domain Name News & Website Stuff

Domain Name Industry News and Website Stuff

Featured Domains

18 end user domain sales up to $55,000

by — Domain Sales 1 Comment

.Co has a strong week and an end-user buys a three-letter .com domain.

Picture of a robot at a tradeshow with a virtual remote operator

Attend a real tradeshow virtually? That’s ExpoBot’s pitch. It bought ExpoBot.com at Sedo. Picture from ExpoBot.com.

Imagine attending a trade expo virtually through a robot. That’s the idea behind ExpoBot. I guarantee you its $5,000 domain purchase is small potatoes compared to its R&D budget.

ExpoBot.com is just one of many excellent end user sales at Sedo that closed this past week.

Here’s a look at sales to end users that recently closed at Sedo. See prior end user lists here.

IKG.com $55,000 – An end-user, three-letter domain purchase. Harsco Industrial IKG bought the domain and forwards it to HarscoIKG.com.

Simplist.com $30,000 – This is a product development company. Its brands include Custom SLR performance camera gear, Think Ergo ergonomic wear and FLYT minimalist accessories.

Buck.co $19.888 – I’m going to count this as an end user even though we don’t know who bought it yet. The price is an end user price for .co. The Whois currently shows hosting service Media Temple.

MyAlternatives.com $11,250 – Alternatives Funeral & Cremation services, which uses the domain MyAlternatives.ca.

Property.co $10,000 – The buyer is setting up a real estate search site on the domain.

Voltix.com €10,000 – Voltix Inc provides commercial and residential electrical services.

Bike2Go.de €7,485 – Bulls is a bicycle brand. The domain currently forwards to bulls.de.

9mile.com $5,500 – Forwards to 9mile-vodka.com, a new vodka brand launching soon. The site is still in development with a release time listed as July 2019.

ExpoBot.com $5,000 – I thought this was a joke at first but it’s real. This company has a robot that can attend your tradeshow. Picture a robot moving through an expo floor, and on the other end a “visitor” is interacting with the robot via a webcam.

BeyondBlack.com $4,000 & BBlack.com $3,500 – These two keyword domains were purchased by web development shop Sevenval Technologies GmbH. They are likely for a client.

LaunchOne.com $2,900 – Forwards to LaunchOne.net, a company focused on pharmaceutical launch services.

BuildingInnovation.org $2,788 – This will be the website for National Institute of Building Sciences’ Building Innovation conference.

LoveMeHair.com $2,662 – Forwards to LuvMeHair.com, an artificial hair and wig products company. Luv fails the radio test so this was a smart buy.

TheLearningHub.com $2,488 – Forwards to AACSB.edu. AACSB International (AACSB) is a global nonprofit education association focused on leadership training.

DrProperty.com €2,400 – A marketing website for properties in Dubai.

EasyMediaKit.com $2,000 – An online tool for companies to make media kits. It generates the template based on a website. It’s clever.

DropBoy.com €2,000 – DropBoy is a dispatch system between a distributor and delivery drivers.

Australian Broadcasting Corporation loses attempt to get ABC.net

by — Policy & Law 1 Comment

Australian public broadcaster loses attempt to get 24-year-old ABC.net domain name.

Screenshot of ABC.net.au for Australian Broadcasting Corporation

Australian Broadcasting Corporation lost its attempt to get ABC.net

Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), Australia’s national broadcaster, has lost a cybersquatting complaint it brought against the domain name ABC.net.

The broadcaster failed to convince a World Intellectual Property Organization panelist that the domain name was registered in bad faith. After all, it’s a very common term.

The domain owner registered it in 1995 while working at an ISP, and later put the domain name to use.

ABC didn’t seem to mind much about the domain until the domain owner contacted it in 2017 advising that he was receiving misdirected emails.

This is the second UDRP decision in as many days in which misdirected email was discussed. In both cases, the owner of a ccTLD was losing email to another domain. ABC’s website is ABC.net.au. In a recent case for Farrer.com, the Complainant used farrer.co.uk and was losing email to the .com.

Panelist Rober Badgley did not find that ABC filed the complaint as attempted reverse domain name hijacking. He noted that, while its complaint was slanted to its preferred narrative, it did not make false statements or glaring omissions. Badgley wrote, “this may be more a case of lacking appreciation of the nuances of this case than a calculated attempt to wrest a domain name from an innocent and smaller party.”

Afilias to offer Registry Lock service

by — Services 3 Comments

28 more top level domains can be locked at the registry level.

Picture of lock on bars with the words "Registry Lock" above it in black letters on yellow background

Afilias is the latest domain name registry to offer a Registry Lock service for websites that need added protection against hijacking and nameserver changes.

Registry Lock is very different from locking a domain name at a registrar. A typical domain lock means a domain can’t be transferred to another registrar until it is unlocked in the registrar interface.

Registry Lock requires manual authentication with both the registrar and registry before changes can be made to a domain.

Different registries have different procedures, but Registry Lock usually requires a domain owner to request a change with the registrar and then the registrar completes a manual process with the registry to allow the change. Domain registrar Blacknight explains the process on its website.

It’s a necessary service for big websites, and would have saved the New York Times from having its nameservers hijacked in 2013.

As of 2013, .com registry Verisign charged $10 a month for its Registry Lock service. Registrars typically charge $300-$600 per year because of the manual work involved. I suspect registrars will charge a similar price for Afilas’ service, although brand protection registrars often bundle it with other services.

The Afilias service will be available for 28 top level domains.

Farrer & Co law firm loses cybersquatting dispute

by — Policy & Law 1 Comment

Company tries to get matching .com that receives misdirected email.

Screen grab of Farrer & Co website and web address Farrer.co.uk

Not .com, and that’s causing issues for this law firm.

If you don’t own the .com version of your domain name, you are likely missing emails intended for your company.

That’s why law firm Farrer & Co LLP filed a UDRP against Farrer.com. It uses Farrer.co.uk, and it learned that clients sent sensitive information to email addresses at @Farrer.com.

The firm lost the dispute, though.

A three-member World Intellectual Property Organization panel found that Farrer didn’t show that the owner, which runs an IT firm, lacked legitimate rights or interests in the domain. It also didn’t show that the domain was registered in bad faith.

The panel pointed out that the law firm could have obtained the domain on a couple of occasions as it has changed hands twice since it was originally registered in 1997.

It appears that the current registrant acquired the domain in a NameJet auction in 2012 for only $3,100.

The panel stopped short of finding Farrer & Co LLP to have filed the case in bad faith.

Thoughts on domain price increases, two weeks later

by — Policy & Law 14 Comments

Here are my thoughts after processing ICANN’s pricing decision for the past two weeks.

Image of dollar sign and upwards arrow

It’s been two weeks since ICANN quietly announced that it was going forward with removing price caps on .org, .biz and .info domain names.

The comment period was a farce. ICANN–or a few people in ICANN–decided they wanted to get out of the price control business.

What’s interesting here is that it doesn’t seem that this change was brought on by the registries that stand to benefit. Maybe they asked, but I don’t think they made a big push for price cap removal. After all, they already had generous 10%-a-year increases in their contracts.

There’s no reason to spew hate on the registries at this time. This was all ICANN.

In making the pricing proposal, ICANN stated:

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

ICANN now has a goal of treating all registry operators the same, even though legacy TLDs were launched in an entirely different market. Even though current domain owners are “stuck” with the domains they have.

There is a very high switching cost to domain names. A company that has used a domain for decades could suddenly face a steep renewal fee. It then has three choices:

  1. Expend resources and money to switch to another domain. Change all of its email, set up SEO redirects, etc.
  2. Pay the higher price
  3. Renew now for ten years

It’s the last option that ICANN says protects domain registrants. They can renew their domain now at today’s price, assuming they realize the fees are about to increase.

But that just kicks the can down the road for ten years. It’s typical bureaucrat thinking. It will be Göran Marby’s unfortunate legacy.

In the near term, I don’t expect the impacted registries to make significant price increases. In fact, I suspect .org registry Public Interest Group may increase prices less over the next few years than it would have had it had the old 10% price increase option because now it’s under the microscope.

The long term is a different story. It’s likely that first-year prices will remain low through promotions but renewal prices will increase. And if one of these registries decides to sell itself to a private equity group or another company? All bets are off.