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Top 5 Domain Name Wire stories in April

by — Uncategorized 0 Comments

From domain hijacking to new TLDs, these were the top stories last month.

As I do every month, let’s kick May off with a look at the top stories in the domain name business from the past month. These are ranked in the order of pageviews on Domain Name Wire.

1. Wow: Spectrum (Charter) is a reverse domain name hijacker – Why did one of the nation’s biggest cable and communications companies resort to reverse domain name hijacking? This is a shocking case.

2. This $20 billion company uses a new TLD for its website, and… – DXC Technology, a merger of CSC and HP Enterprise Services, is using a .technology domain name for its website but .com for email.

3. An outgoing TLD manager reflects on the past and future of “new” domains – Francesco Cetraro gives an honest take on the state of new top level domains.

4. What domains HP Enterprise and other end users bought last week – One of my weekly end user domain sales columns was quite popular last month.

5. How selling cheap domains ruins your TLD for all users – Top level domain operators that sell domains for cheap risk ruining their reputation…leading to legitimate users abandoning the extension.

Here are last month’s podcasts:

Talking domains with Kevin Murphy (#133)
Making money with brandable domains (#132)
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times (Andrew Rosener) (#131)
Naming a Business (#130)

Wow: Spectrum (Charter) is a reverse domain name hijacker

by — Policy & Law 6 Comments

Your cable company might be a reverse domain name hijacker.

Would you like a bogus cybersquatting complaint with your cable bundle?

Charter Communications, which does business as Spectrum, has been found guilty of reverse domain name hijacking in a cybersquatting dispute it brought against the owner of MySpectrumNews.com.

Based on the decision, it appears that Spectrum tried to acquire this domain name that was registered well before it created the Spectrum brand. When acquisition talks didn’t go where the company hoped, it filed a UDRP.

Not only did the owner of MySpectrumNews.com register the domain before Charter’s Spectrum brand was introduced, but they actually put the domain name to use.

Spectrum argued that the domain name was renewed in bad faith. Even though that argument didn’t go anywhere, it turns out that the domain name hasn’t even been renewed since the Spectrum brand was introduced. A quick look at historical Whois records show that was renewed in 2011 for a day in late 2017.

A unanimous three-member World Intellectual Property Organization panel wrote: Click to continue reading…