Women Com in GE/ NBC Legal Dispute

Sometimes big dollar domain sales go wrong. Witness the legal issues between NBC Universal, the seller of both Women.com and Women.net from NBC and iVillage to Ben Padnos. The ex parte motions read like civil matters gone amok, except that a huge amount of clicks are at stake. Benjamin Padnos of Done Ventures bought the names on Sedo. This happened May 24th of 2010.

But minus amenable settlement of the deal he had tried filing a restraining order on NBC Universal, to cease them from using the names online. NBC, one of the biggest names and companies in entertainment with an ambitious online campaign for programming and marketing, evidently wants to keep them. How did things go so wrong? NBC claims Jeff Zucker countermanded the sale after Sedo informed the principal contacts at NBC the names were sold.

With control of the actual name(s) staying with NBC, every day that goes by is a win for the Peacock, and a loss for the Sedo buyer. Question: Are sellers and Jeff Zucker not bound by Sedo Terms of Service? The poor domain buyer thought he could actually fork over a million bucks and actually get two domain names. Per the filed legal text, NBC currently points the names to iVillage for traffic.

This legal hootenanny comes after receipt of an email every domainer dreams of getting:  ”Alan and Ben, Congratulations!  The offer for Women.com has been accepted!” Sedo’s reply email indicates that NBC/GE would be creating a Bill of Sale for the $ 1 million sale.  ” The legal case will determine much for the future pathway of online legal binding sales.Furthermore, do GE/NBC stockholders know they just lost a cool million?

Female audiences for online female products and women’s sites for everything from makeup to venture capital funding is a titanic market. Hence GE and NBC Universal’s interest in keeping the name. Parent company GE is based in New York, although key NBC Universal offices are in Burbank and Los Angeles, California. Domainers should bookmark their legal case watching to make sure their next big dream bid goes through.

Registrars Not Spammer Responsible

Ah, those Californians.  Plaintiff Daniel L Balsam had won a $1.125 million default judgment against a spammer after receiving over 1,000 pieces of pornographic spam. But now a California appeals court has ruled against that verdict. Balsam, unable to recover the money,  found that the spammer had hidden his identity behind Tucows’ Whois privacy. Balsam then sued the registrar for the cash instead.

Balsam did his homework and argued that he was a 3rd party beneficiary according to the ICANN Registrar Accreditation Agreement. Tucows and all  registrars must operate according to these terms. has the door been opened for spammers everywhere providing they purchase domains with Privacy options and conduct business until found out?

Judge Margaret McKeown of the ninth circuit Court of Appeals opined that while Tucows the “registrar” is bound by the RAA, Tucows the “registrant” is not. In English: Even under the Privacy service, Balsam (and others) cannot expect registrars to be liable for their clients’ spamming. Tucows (naturally) was not pleased and suggested that ICANN become involved, since their  interpretation of the RAA could lead to “frivolous and vexatious lawsuits”.

Verisign Raising Rates

Causing a ruffle in the domainer feathers this week was the news that Verisign was originating an across the board name registration/renewal hike. This price increase comes not at a bad time in the economy, but at a questionable time for lower end domainers struggling to retain the bulk of the names in their portfolios.

Verisign resellers (known or unknown registry holders) and tier priced administrators of select name and TLD portfolio based holdings are concerned. Industry watchers speculate that intrinsic and value based domain registration prices may eventuate. Will other resellers be affected? How will price controls for domains fluctuate in future?

Domainers are considering how the pricing will affect the domaining market as a whole. Challenges to the Verisign price monopoly are rife. Reaction to the news ranges from letting domains drop to bulk renewal before the price goes up officially. Critics demand justification for this rise in price, virtual expenses being what they are.

Goose?… Golden Egg? …Bueller?

Triple X Adult TLD to Realize?

The triple X adult domain top level domain may be coming to the Web, industry watchers report. The domainers watching this industry quake wonder if the adult online industry, mostly composed of fee-paid video and image services related to pornography, can be a reasonable addition to Internet commerce as such. The lines are being drawn on both sides of the TLD divide.

Those watching the ICANN approval for XXX tld domains are agog after the early days of non-proliferation of web suffixes denoting non-general acceptable matter. While adult sites are a reality and a great commerce builder garnering record traffic and income in every demo, the fact remains they are not welcomed by every hosting company or router online.

Sexually explicit site masters and name owners would be expected to flock to the dot-triple-x tld. Yet the domains in existence now for adult and porn names would putatively lose value and legacy traffic. Not all webmasters are ready to give this up and conjoin their fray to a limited dot tld. Security   software makers and parental control mechanisms for computer devices would be affected.

The opposite side of the coin, the dot-kids suffix, was never approved by ICANN because it was deemed to difficult to patrol and protect. Can ICANN recover some of its lost luster as the Internet regulator? Or will ICANN critics finally have something solid to bring to bear in challenging the agency’s management and ongoing oversight of domain name and web issues? Time will tell.

Ticketed TN Man buys Local PD Domain

They don’t mess around with domains lightly in Bluff City, Tennessee. Brian McCrary of Tennessee got a $90 ticket for speeding and when he went to the police website and saw the pending renewal notice, he floored his credit card and nabbed the domain when it dropped. The new site, online now at BluffCitypd.com, details speed trap camera information in that locale.

Talk about a speed trap on the information superhighway! McCrary got the perfect revenge. Suspecting he had been the victim of a speed trap, he initially approached the police website to complain. McCrary works for an ISP and ramped to Godaddy for a $80 pickup of the renewal status drop.

The story is attracting both domainer amusement and cynicism from Bluff City residents. Word is that until reporters started asking questions the police department didn’t even know their domain had expired. The uniques McCrary is now pulling in may top 90K. Police allege the site is merely revenge for the ticket and that aggressive ticketing has cut down on motor vehicle accidents.

Evidently the Godaddy domain expiration notification emails went to the account that had been allegedly hacked and closed or shut off. This story is a lesson to all sloppy webmasters who ignore their domaining responsibilities. In the year 2010, with the internet part of the everyday life of citizens worldwide, having a tech guy “out sick” is no excuse.

Internet fraud’s price put at $550 million

Today’s cost of American online fraud comes in at a staggering $550 million. Authorities are tracing white collar crime growth in the triple triple digits. The anonymity afforded by the internet allows fraud and other crimes to be perpetrated on a broader scale than ever before. Viruses, piracy, and fee based scams were the principal cause of the frauds. California is the American state where more internet fraud crimes than anywhere else were reported.

Paypal Suspends Personal Accts India

PayPal, an eBay company, has suspended personal payments to and from India and transfers to local banks in the country. Domainers using Indian talent to produce SEO or content products may be stalled making payments or getting paid for services. PayPal is used in India by many to receive payment for services such as software development and freelance writing.

Customers can still make commercial payments to India, but merchants cannot withdraw funds in rupees at local Indian banks, it added. This will convolute many existing partnerships and vendor arrangements with domainers and their clients. But Paypal cites the difficulty resolving payment issues and identity problems with an Indian originating vendor or client.

The India Paypal personal banking services online and between Indian merchant branches function online in a critical capacity for international commerce. Paypal operations for personal accounts using Paypal have been suspended while the company works with its “business partners and other stakeholders to address questions they have about the service.” 

PayPal said it is trying to resolve the situation as quickly as possible and that it was sorry for the inconvenience that it may cause its customers in India and around the world. A number of bloggers and Web sites have reported that the company has reversed and returned payments to senders.

PayPal executives in the region were not available for comment on specific reasons why the service was discontinued. Allegations of international identity theft and questionable transactions will cause Paypal to review banking traffic between Indian members and clients, as well as other global banking transaction originators.

The move by PayPal may be linked to new Indian government rules aimed at preventing money laundering, according to an analyst who spoke on condition of anonymity. Last November, the Indian government introduced rules requiring financial institutions and other intermediaries to verify the identity of clients carrying out international money transfers.

PayPal’s user agreement says it does not guarantee any user’s identity because verifying identity of an indian individual is virtually impossible with current Paypal resources.  PayPal does reserve the right to validate customers’ identities, including asking for documents.

PayPal is used in India by many to receive payment for services such as software development and freelance writing. But the exchange of international services in Russia and China may depend on these issues.

Wanted: Internet Url Police

As the Haiti relief flowed to the disaster area, scammers were registering exploitative domain names and setting up false charity websites to target well-meaning donaters. The London Daily News featured a story on the opportunistic and fraudulent nature of these scams, but experts wonder if an Internet policing authority might not be appropriate to take down sites before the public gets scammed. When you are one url away from getting fleeced, wouldn’t it be prudent to have set some domain handling controls in place?

Deleting Domains Perk Up

The Pool.com list of Deleting Domains shows some action potential as G4B.com goes auctional. Touch.net and Youtub.com make for intriguing web possibilities. ADBT.com makes an acronym possible, and more  TLd’s like dd0s.biz are releasing ever day. Time to start shopping for that brand you always had in mind.

Domaining Hits the Beeb

Not often domainers see a BBC news story centered around domaining. Yet the BBC news network ran a recent story concerning the .me development market. Montenegro’s little TLD that could has garnered massive me-dia attention and helps domainers sell to end users. Over 50,000 live registrations marked a decided lively market of “me”. Now if only the Sudanese United Villagers would form a country….and get the .SUV TLD off the ground.

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