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:Who cares?

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Who really cares about getting EU addresses anyway? I guess asking that makes me sound like an isolated bumpkin American, but honestly the same goes for .us and pretty much any other TLD that isn't .com. Do companies really stand to make megamillions selling non-.com addresses? I just don't see it.

Halfway through the initial registration, the .eu domain became the third largest, behind .com and .uk. They have probably passed .uk by now. It is not shaping up to be one of those ignored TLDs. So, yes a lot of people care about it and yes big money is involved.

Re:Who said business is fair?

[graffix_jones]

I can't believe that you think that this scam is how business works... any time you can 'game' a system, chances are that proper precautions should have been taken to prevent it, and it should've been illegal.

The point he's trying to make is that there were several unimplemented methods that would've prevented these bogus registrars from gaming the system, and in fact people running the EURid land rush were notified in advance by several 'legitimate' registrars about the loopholes in the system, and refused to do anything about it (in fact going so far as to completely ignore them).

Enron also 'gamed' the system, and look how much damage that caused. It's fair to say that this could also have some dire financial consequences against those who were meant to benefit from this process.

I think his suggestions at the end of TFA have merit, and it would be nice to see something done about this scam... I have a hunch, though, that those in the EURid who allowed the system to be 'gamed' have a financial stake in the gaming process... otherwise these loopholes would've been closed long before the land rush began.

I'd argue that...

[jd]

Nobody has any business buying more than one or two domain names anyway. Most things would be far better off in a subdomain (movies, for example), where they won't pollute the namespace AND it is explicitly clear as to who does the owning. (This would also eliminate most trademark issues, as then differentiation would be built into the system and deceptive naming would become considerably harder. For this reason, coincidental similarities in names would not be so significant as trademark issues, as it would often be provable that no confusion exists.) It also encourages cybersquatting and typo-squatting.

The clutter isn't helped by lazy, inefficient admins and registrars who don't maintain records correctly, but that's another issue altogether.

I can't help but think it would save everyone a lot of grief if all TLD admins, registrars, cybersquatters and ICANN members were just rounded up and sent to Siberia for a couple of decades.

So who are the "Company Xs"?

[bVork]

I'd really like to know which companies pulled this scam.

I found one of them. Dotster is the one behind a whole bunch of Vancouver-based registrars.

Has anyone else had any luck tracking down the other companies behind this?