The .EU Landrush Fiasco

googleking writes "Bob Parsons, CEO and Founder of GoDaddy.com, has blogged about the .EU landrush fiasco. During the landrush phase for names which opened last Friday, established 'big name' registrars got exactly equal chances of registering names as did anyone who chose to bill themselves as a registrar. Bob asserts that hundreds of these new 'registrars' are actually fake fronts for a big name US company." From the article: "Here's how it works: All the accredited registrars line up and each registrar gets to make one request for a .EU domain name. If the name is available, the registrar gets the name for its customer. If the name is not available, the registrar gets nothing. Either way, after making the request, the registrar goes to the back of the line and won't get to make another request, until all the registrars in the line in front of it make their requests. This continues until all requests have been made and the landrush process is over ... The landrush process on the surface seems very fair. But there was something wrong with the process -- very wrong."

Comments

That is BS

[protich]

I was involved in the Landrush. Each registrar was allowed one request per second. NO round-robin/line as mentioned on the sumarry.

Re:That is BS

[HadenT]

I'm surprised about this missunderstanding too. There where 3 basic rules:
Max of one connection _attempt_ per second per IP (time ban if more)
5 IPs for registrar.
One concurrent connection at time.

In perfect world this would be round-robin.
However when registry system is loaded it starts to loose connections/timeout/etc. How registrar system behaved on such conditions was very important.

Of course additional accounts changed the picture, and that was discused on EURid mailing lists - however they didn't give a damn about it.

However some registrars moved like turtles and that was mostly their (systems) fault.

Re:But what is it?

[therealnospam]

The second is correct.

The .EU Sunrise Fiasco Was Worse!

[sweborg]

The .EU landrush was nothing more than a fight for the leftovers. All the "good" names went during the Sunrise 2 period.

To put it simple, the launch of the .EU was divided into three phases. (1) Sunrise 1: Trademarks, (2) Sunrise 2: Company names, (3) Landrush: Open for all.

During Sunrise 2 some cybersquatters located in Europe found out that they could register new companies names that contained "generic" terms. Like "Joe's Casino Ltd.", "Wise Money Investments Ltd", "ABC Insurances Ltd", etc. Using the company registration certificate they could apply and register domain names with generic terms even before the landrush.

EURid who operates the .eu top level domain was informed about this.
EURid comments on the issue of generic domain names

To register a new company can be as little as $100. There is a huge profit to be made as popular domains usually do not go for less than $1000 and the most popular ones, like casino.eu, will sell for much much more.

Examples on some of the domains that were registered before 7th of April (first day of landrush):
auction.eu, auto.eu, bank.eu, beauty.eu, book.eu, books.eu, business.eu, buy.eu, car.eu, cars.eu, casino.eu, computer.eu, computers.eu, credit.eu, design.eu, drug.eu, drugs.eu, dvd.eu, escort.eu, film.eu, finance.eu, find.eu, fitness.eu, flowers.eu, food.eu, football.eu, free.eu, gambling.eu, games.eu, golf.eu, health.eu, help.eu, holiday.eu, hosting.eu, hotel.eu, insurance.eu, internet.eu, job.eu, jobs.eu, law.eu, lawyer.eu, loan.eu, loans.eu, love.eu, mail.eu, marketing.eu, medical.eu, mobile.eu, money.eu, mortage.eu, movie.eu, music.eu, office.eu, online.eu, outdoor.eu, poker.eu, privacy.eu, realestate.eu, search.eu, security.eu, sell.eu, sex.eu, shop.eu, show.eu, sport.eu, sports.eu, stocks.eu, tax.eu, trade.eu, travel.eu, weather.eu, web.eu, website.eu, wireless.eu, women.eu, work.eu

Note: I got this list from third party. I have checked most of them to be sure they were registered before 7th of April, but not all of them. You can check when they were register by visiting this site: Whois .EU

There isn't much you could do to stop it

[rfc1394]

Here were the comments I posted on Bob Parson's blog regarding the so-called 'gaming the system' by someone or some group creating hundreds of registrars :

Well, there isn't really any way to work around this, as someone could simply have paid $50 each or whatever the cheapest state in the U.S. charges for corporations, and register 1000 corporations, then have each apply separately. After they get whatever domains they want, they sell them - for $1 - to the destined 'master corporation' and discontinue operators by doing a wind-up and dissolve . As legal as church on Sunday and as legally invulnerable. Whether you like it or not, a corporation is a separate entity from its directors or stockholders, and two separate corporations created by the same incorporator are, as a matter of law, three separate entities and entitled to recognition as separate entities. So even if some of the registrars are fake, they could still do the whole thing by registering lots of corporations separately. Raises the price by $50 each registrar but when we are looking at potentially tens or hundreds of thousands of euros per domain name they get, it's chump change.

Are you upset because you don't like what they are doing or are you upset because you didn't think to do it? You're the owner of a corporation; realize the purpose of a corporation is to provide limited liability for its owner(s) and thus allowing them, in effect, to legally cheat their creditors by denying them access to the owner's personal assets if the business fails. (Your company isn't public so I presume you're not needing to sell stock, which is a different matter). If this wasn't the purpose of a separate entity, one wouldn't need to incorporate, one could simply operate it as a sole proprietor under a fictitious name. But operating in corporate form allows one limited liability and separate existence from the corporate form. And if someone wants to set up a bunch of alleged 'sham' registrars, there really isn't any way to do it unless you only allow registrars to be individuals.

Short of that, there is always some way someone could - as you call it - 'game the system'.

If names would have been more valuable that multiple registrants would want the same names, then the answer is for the EU registry to auction them itself, thus draining the profit away from middlemen resellers.

Maybe it might seem unfair, but your comment sounds more like sour grapes. As long as someone registering in a system does not have to be a human being and can be a legal entity someone can always find a way to make multiple registrations in that system.

Paul Robinson