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

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.

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.