It’s all over the news and if you have missed it – it’s too bad. GoDaddy recently announced their strong support for SOPA/PIPA legislation only to revert their position once public outcry started affecting their bottom line. It is obvious that reversal is a purely a PR stunt and a bad one at it. No one argues that any company is out there to make money, but advocating legislation that, in the long run, will prevent people from making more money is plain stupid. The SOPA support game that GoDaddy has got themselves into is a short small gain, long big loss kind of a deal and any company that has any future plans should have known better than that. Judging by GoDaddy’s recent actions – they don’t. This leads to only one simple conclusion – I cannot afford to trust my domains and domains of my clients to company who can’t forecast their own future within a year or two. Nothing personal, just business – can’t trust the company that doesn’t know what it is doing.

Having said that – I have begun the process of moving my domains away from GoDaddy. First 7 are already on the way to Name.com right now. As you can imagine, transferring some 140 domains away from GoDaddy is a significant expense and is time consuming, however, I feel very strongly about making a move. The process will be gradual – at the end of the month I will move a batch of domains that are scheduled to renew in the next month or two. It will not generate a big lump in GoDaddy’s monthly reports and I probably will not receive a phone call from GoDaddy begging me to return. However, I will feel somewhat better knowing that my money will not fund the idiocy and waste that is SOPA/PIPA.

Happy New Year everyone.

While everybody raving about the latest ICANN initiative to create their own little wild wild west (or Klondike) selling root zone domain names not that many people realize the impact it will do on the surfing as we know it.

So far, here’s what ICANN plans to do:

• allow registering of any primary domain zone (.istudioweb, .microsoft, .yahoo)
• allow registering primary domain zones in national character sets (like cyrillic, chinese, etc.)
• allow trademark holders to have a priority in registering a zone
• set the price in 6-numbers area, or auctioning zones, so that cybersquatters will not be able to afford it

Now let’s take a closer look at this bright picture. As of right now everyone agrees that .com is the only widely recognizable zone for commercial domains. If I look at mybusiness.com, mybusiness.info and info.mybusiness domains – I’m sure to point my browser to the first one – because it is recognizable and this is what I am used to. That’s just before everything else comes to mind. Now – back to bulletpoints.

Primary Domain Zone

Aside from the state of mass confusion, there will be a bunch of zones that won’t really give you much. I’m sure Google will have its .Google zone to make me visit http://mail.google, http://news.google and http://images.google, but would be any different then GMail, Google News or Google Image Search? Not really. So what’s the benefit for me as a visitor? Zero.

If we’re talking about an unknown (at least to me) brand, then it gets worse. If I see a link to auto.zone – will I get to a car dealership or an automated malware distributor? Again, for me as a consumer the new domain zones create a big fat layer of confusion, while adding little (if that) to convenience of browsing.

National Character Sets In Domain Names

This is very good idea for scammers of all kinds. After all – what could be better then luring an unsuspecting american capitalist to the web site that spells “we-steal-credit-cards-from-americans.russia” in cyrillic alphabet, full with 0-day browser exploits and viruses. More words – more fun! And scammer’s friends will be aware not to visit this site. Convenient, eh? Additional benefit – there is no way such a victim can warn others, since there are no such letters on his keyboard. And ICANN gets paid for this!

Trademark Holders To Have Priority In Registering Zones

The latest grudge over trademarks that I recall was iPhone and Apple. I’m sure by the time this gets available, there will be much more trademark holders then there are domain zones. By the way, who are trademark holders of words “dating”, “pharma” and “sex”? That would be a rich crowd…

Pricing In 6-Digit Area Or Auctioning

This is the biggest pile of nonsense I’ve seen since the “American’s weren’t on the Moon” thing. Imagine a small business that wants to own .widgets. By setting the price anywhere higher then $10,000 ICANN makes damn sure that this small business is out of the game. Who will buy it then? Cybersquatters, ofcourse, who already selling domains for thousands of dollars and therefore command sums much larger then any small business can afford paying for domain name.

Now, let’s say I have enough money to register that .widgets zone. Then I would offer second-level names to anyone in widgets business. For reasonable amount of $100/year you can register JonDoe.widgets and be a proud owner of your domain. After two years when your web site is widely recognized by search engines, I decide that I don’t want to sell names on .widgets anymore and you will have to find yourself another domain name. The .widgets zone is my property, so I do as I wish. Then I set up a placeholder on JonDoe.widgets with a lot of ads and affiliate links and voila – you just brought me thousands of dollars for free. No, wrong – you paid me $200 (plus applicable text) so that I could make thousands off of your web site. Nice, eh?

To wrap up the rant – imagine if yet another ICANN’s initiative was to write IPv6 addresses in Roman numbers, instead of hexadecimal notation. More words – more fun, right?

If you are in limo, party bus or exotic bus industry, or know someone who is – than this announcement is for you. As I have discovered recently, one of the domains I possess and utilized as a testbed for a party bus and limo web site (because it’s short and convenient) turned up as high as on a top of a second page on some limo bus related queries in Google.

I know there are some people who may need this domain more then I do. So I am totally open to anyone willing to purchase that domain from me. Just bear in mind that it’s a good position if you don’t have anything near that, it’s a short 4-letter domain without low-quality letters and I am willing to let it go fast.

Having said all that – make me an interesting offer and next thing you know: your web site is alreay on a second page.

P.S. Unfortunately, I cannot sell the design and pictures for the web site that’s there (they belong to my client), but the core (scripts and database) are all yours. For an additional (negotiable) fee I even help you make your best to retain the position while updating the web site with your information.

As is was outlined in DotSauce post today – ICANN may be about to put an end to the domain tasting as we know it. The positive outcome is perfectly outlined in the referenced post above. However, not all is so bright.

With latest talks about ICANN changing ownership from US Department of Commerce to some international body run by UN, folks at domain name monopoly may have decided to soften up just a bit.

What this means is there is a lot of controversy about how domain industry should be run. Local governments are going crazy at the idea that they can own a piece of internet. Most governments, like Germany, immediately think China’s Great Firewall. Russia wants Cyrillic domain names and no access to outside networks unless explicitly permitted by senior party member (just kidding). All this is impossible while core domain name servers are run by US. Well, generally speaking, US can abuse its power here, but so far I didn’t hear any of this happened. And IT people are very cranky all over the world.

But stopping domain name tasting has at least one more negative aspect, at least from my personal perspective. The expired domain lists are about to get a lot larger. Watch out!

According to Moniker, there are not that many domain names with words WebDesign before top-level zone available. Today I ran a search and here’s the list of available domain names:
WEBDESIGN.AC
WEBDESIGN.AERO
WEBDESIGN.BIZ.PL
WEBDESIGN.CLUB.TW
WEBDESIGN.COM.AG
WEBDESIGN.COM.KI
WEBDESIGN.COM.MU
WEBDESIGN.COM.NF
WEBDESIGN.COM.SC
WEBDESIGN.COM.VC
WEBDESIGN.EBIZ.TW
WEBDESIGN.GAME.TW
WEBDESIGN.GEN.IN
WEBDESIGN.IND.IN
WEBDESIGN.INFO.PL
WEBDESIGN.KI
WEBDESIGN.NET.AG
WEBDESIGN.NET.KI
WEBDESIGN.NET.MU
WEBDESIGN.NET.NF
WEBDESIGN.NET.SC
WEBDESIGN.NET.VC
WEBDESIGN.NF
WEBDESIGN.NOM.ES
WEBDESIGN.ORG.AG
WEBDESIGN.ORG.KI
WEBDESIGN.ORG.MU
WEBDESIGN.ORG.SC
WEBDESIGN.ORG.VC

As you can see, only two top level domain names left. Time to run!

After numerous confirmations of scam-like business practices, Network Solution is now looking into implementing a feature that will allow users to “lock” domain for 4 days, instead of doing this for them automatically. Ironically, this feature look just awfully familiar – just like “domain tasting”. With difference being that now anyone can lock the domain without even providing their contact info. Don’t even need to set up various fake registrars to grab and drop domains for tasting, just keep searching for it.

Another bad trick here is that since domain name would appear registered – there is a very good chance squatters may snipe it right the moment it will be released. And it is already very well known what it means. Some of my clients paid pretty large sums for their trademarked name – just to get it faster then through the lawsuit.

Interesting facts:

• In 2000 Network Solutions was purchased by Verisign for $21 billion.
• In 2007 they were purchased for $800 million.

My take? If you have domain names at Network Solutions – move them to someone not so dangerous. GoDaddy, Moniker or NameCheap (we use all three of them) look much better.

So, after all this time it turns out to be true – someone DOES snitch domain names at the time of the search. Guess who that might be? Some anonymous hacker? Wrong! It’s one of the largest domain name registrar – Network Solutions. Multiple blogs and other sources confirm that NetSol preserves any .com name searched through their web site for at least 4 days “to protect customers from front-runners”.

What it looks like to me is that whenever any company feels too comfortable at the place it is bad things start to happen. But off with the generalizations. I have some clients who have some domains registered through Network Solutions. After a hit like that the company might do all kinds of crazy stuff, so I better have those domains secured at other registrars.

(initially this was a reply to the discussion on WebHostingTalk in regards to the .ws domain name for web hosting business web site)

Running your company’s web site doesn’t really require .com domain. However, for marketing purposes, .com domain is almost a necessity, since most people are so much used to all domain names ending in .com (unless you are running del.icio.us, but that’s whole another story and you wouldn’t need an advice in such a case). One of our clients is running a web site with .us domain (actually, he’s the only client who has a non-dot-com domain, as far as I know), but he is marketing to a different niche and in a different way.

In the early days of .biz and .info these TLDs were offered at a huge discount, or even for free. A lot of fraudsters, scammers and spammers have grabbed nice looking domains in those zones which led to the common perception of these domains as “knock-offs”, “fakes” or businesses in third-world countries that shouldn’t be trusted. Currently it’s not exactly true, but that’s what we usually hear from prospective clients when choosing domain name for their web sites.

.COM is a must if you are running E-commerce web site. I would also suggest same approach if you are running web hosting business. There are a lot of aftermarket names you can snatch for a very low fee (we also have some hosting domains for sale). If that’s too expensive – your business model must be wrong.

Treat yourself with a gift of nice domain name. The option to buy right there isn’t enabled yet, but if you like any of the domain names we have on sale – feel free to contact me an any moment. Oh, and we are open for negotiations, so if you strongly feel you can convince us to sell you something at a different price – don’t hesitate to let us know.

Glad I was brave enough in past time to snatch some of my own:
BUKB.COM
BUKB.NET
BUKV.COM
BUKV.NET
BYKB.COM
BYKB.NET
HO5T.BIZ
HO5T.COM
HO5T.NET
IZBG.COM
VGRU.COM
VGRU.NET
WGNX.NET