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

Umm...

[Opportunist]

Did anyone expect anything else? It's kinda funny how naive they were, actually thinking that people would be "good" and play by the "rules".

Re:That is BS

[LunaticTippy]

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

You don't understand?! If registrar X had 99 bogus registrars set up they get 100/second. That's more than 1/second.

I do not think that means what you think...

[pla]

The landrush process on the surface seems very fair.

We apparently have radically different ideas of what counts as "fair".


established 'big name' registrars got exactly equal chances of registering names as did anyone who chose to bill themselves as a registrar

And what about Joe Jones and Sally Brown? Or more to the point, what about Steve McDonald, Cindy Frye, or Dan Walmart?

What you call "fair", I decry as massively biased right from the start. The very flaw you intend to point out, rather than making the process less fair, has imparted the only truly "fair" part of the entire dog-n'-pony.


I'll consider the process fair when humans get first choice, and trying to trademark common single English words carries the corporate death-penalty. Until then, let's not bother quibbling about whether conqueror-X or conqueror-Y managed to rape the most natives.

Consider the source...

[Cherita Chen]

Has anyone stopped to consider the source? Bob Parsons is notorious for his whining... Anyone who takes a gander at his blog every now and then is privy to the ex-Marine, poor-boy-done-good, megalomaniac either tooting his own horn, or complaining about the business practices of his competitors. Gimme-a-big-fat-Break!

Re:Who said business is fair?

[wytcld]

The problem's like this: There's an inverse relationship between corruption and overall, long-term, culture-wide profitability. Yeah, somebody usually manages to get rich even in the most corrupt places. But it's a far smaller proportion that manages it. And even armored cars and bodyguards don't prevent the kidnappings and assasinations that go along with that sort of culture.

Do you really think Western Europe and North America would be better off if our business cultures fully embraced the models of Nigeria and Russia?

Why not auction them off?

[fortinbras47]

I think the basic issue is that price of a domain name is significantly below the market value. As I understand it, there are therefore huge incentives for Mr.DomainCamper to try to grab coke.eu for $10 and try to resell it to Coca Cola for $10 billion. There are also huge incentives for Coca Cola to create their own registrar company and get coke.eu before Mr.DomainCamper does. (btw, I know nothing about coke.eu, I picked it at random.)

A more efficient way to initially allocate major domain names might be to run an auction.

Currently, domain names are allocated according to the law of capture. He/she who first claims the domain name and pays a nominal fee has rights to the name. It IS like a land grab where you can acquire the rights to land by just showing up, except it's even worse because to grab land in the American West you generally had to show up and use it.

My rough idea:
(1) Auction period will last one month
(2) At the end of the auction period, domain names that were bid on will go to the highest bidder. (As long as bid is above the minimum bid.) (3) After the auction ends, domain names will be allocated under the old retarded process

This doesn't solve all domain name problems, but it would get popular domain names to the people/companies that value the name the most.

Re:As a European I hate to say it...

[ktappe]

this is what happens when you regulate a market.

No, it's what happens when you claim you've regulated a market so all the law-abiding citizens believe you, but the criminals figure out that you've really done little-to-no regulation at all and create anarchy.

-Kurt