Int’l Doms get ICANN nod

Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is expected to take another step on Friday. ICANN, during its annual meeting in Seoul, Korea, will vote on the internationalized domain names (IDN) initiative, better known as the Fast Track. 

It will provide nations with their own country-code domain names and make the Internet more accessible to millions of people in Asia and the Middle East who speak and read in Arabic, Chinese and Korean.

If approved, the launch of the Fast Track process would be Nov. 16

LLL.com sells SEDO at $48K

Dotgay allies with Cause Org

Dot Gay Alliance unveils a plan to create the .GAY top-level domain that will provide a reliable and ethical source of online funding for LGBT civil rights. Website names and email addresses ending in .GAY  will sponsor a new Internet wave of self-identified LGBT businesses, individuals and organizations and all those who wish to communicate with them.

Ambitious claims:  .GAY will be a community that gives back: A majority of all profits will be returned to the LGBT community to fight for equality in the US and around the world.

Generic web addresses (known as top-level domains) ending in .com, .org, .net, .edu and .gov. will increase when early next year the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) once again starts accepting TLD applications. These top level domains for new web addresses from cities, companies, organizations and entrepreneurial ventures that want to create and support for business and civic causes.

“The LGBT community has always supported itself and its causes – no one was there to help us,” Dolce said. “We’ve made amazing progress in the 40 years since Stonewall. Now in the digital era a .GAY top-level domain is a logical evolution in our history of self sustenance”.

The Dot Gay Alliance is led by Founder & Executive Director Joe Dolce, whose media strategy firm, DolceGoldin, provides communications services for the Alliance. The Dotgay ICANN application has yet to be approved.

The technical infrastructure is provided by Minds + Machines, the international Internet consulting group that is working with a number of new top-level domain efforts, including .NYC www .dotnyc .net with former New York City mayor Ed Koch, and .ECO .supportdoteco .com with the Sierra Club and Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection.

Sedo to Auction L, LL, and LLL .de domains.

Sedo is hosting a Pre-Auction for 1, 2, and 3-character .de domains from now until Thursday, Oct. 22nd at 5PM BST. Pre-bidding is available for all letter and number combinations, or approximately 19,000 newly available domains in the market!

Sedo’s bid burn in before the DENIC, .de registrar, opens the registration period to the public on Friday 23rd at 9 AM (European Time).

Auction occurs via Sedo registar partners  Brokerage teams will try sort out any knots.

New .de Domains Criteria:

- One, two, and three-character domains (letter and number combinations) can now be registered
- German license plate letter combinations are now available for TLD registration
- A domain may be comprised of the digits 0-9, hyphens, the letters A-Z of the Latin alphabet and the other letters listed in the currently valid annex to the Domain Guidelines
- The domain cannot begin or end with a hyphen, nor have hyphens for its third and fourth characters
Domains must be at least one character in length

Google Blanks PR

In a head scratching Tweet heard rounn the domain world, Google has decided to elide the page rank feature from its webmaster menu. To everyday line animals slogging in the blog mines, this is cutting off the mother lode. Is there still gold in them thar domains?

The PageRank tool being dropped for the webmaster toolbox inside domainer Google accounts stunned a number of industry watchers. The strange diachrony between the focused pursuit of Page Rank to add value to a domain or website and the Google position is evident.

Said one industry observer, Susan Moskwa from the Google Webmaster Central team explained it was removed because Google keeps telling webmasters “that they shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much.”

Many domain buyers and resellers maintain Page Rank by Google or Alexa or any other search engine or “bot ” to be gospel during valuation. It’s hard to know if Google intends to abandon its hegemony on page rank for real, as well as in its stated comments and actions to  putative clients and webmasters.

Everybody into the Pool!

The temperature is great at Pool.com for new domains. The Pool list shaping up has one gem, bz0.info, a rarity where the domain is smaller than the subtld. Yahoos.net brings a trademark possibility, and loanlowrate.com must be a star in the making. Driverandcar.com has killer potential, and eloan247.com makes another financial name showing great potential.

Meatball Scripts Lapse Swedish Registry

Swedish meatball scripts cut the input mask required by incoming .se names last evening. The Domain Break in Sweden was significant. Almost a  million Swedish domains went into Area 51 last night as Swedish servers served up an outage. Meatball scripting left a detection mask flaw in the the .se DNS registry programming that omitted referring domain requests without a “.” character to terminate a specific command.

The Swedish registry was then unable to correctly identify .se as a valid domain suffix and prevented users from accessing the sites or delivering email messages. The tab for this could be heavy in lost sales and scheduled functions like banking. Time will tell.

Domain theft at godaddy?

Concerned domainers are watching the situation unfold as a 3 letter dot-com domain name was allegedly stolen using Godaddy tools from its rightful owner. Could Godaddy have unseen vulnerabilities in its transfer system that permit domain theft?

Owner claims first clue came with receipt of Godaddy authorized transfer notification. As many domainers know, there should have been a significant precursor to this process conclusion. Owner values name at $34K.

Insure.com blows out the name…

Insure.com, a publicly traded company whose shares trade on the NASDAQ stock exchange, sold its corporate name and related domain name for $16,000,000. Born as Quotesmith.com,  the company will be renamed Life Quotes. The company paid $1,600,000 for Insure.com in 2001.

Review ICANN policy for disputed domains…

ICANN holds that passive holding of a disputed domain name permits an unlawful inference of registration and domain use in bad faith. The other two tenets of disputed domains are that  no use of the domain name or website that connected with the domain name is occurring, and that the domain holder is not widely known by that name.

For a good example, review the complaint filed with ICANN by West Coast University against a Chinese domain owner for www.wcuedu.us. The decision marks an ICANN enforcement of these elements and domain use dynamics.

Next Page »