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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."
If there's a way to cheat, it will be found.
I ordered mine a week ago, still haven't gotten it. Bah.
I was involved in the Landrush. Each registrar was allowed one request per second. NO round-robin/line as mentioned on the sumarry.
Sounds like Mr. Parsons is just upset he didn't think of making the phony baloney companies like his competitors did.
He lost out, and they'll definetly get away with it.
Sometimes scams pay out. Not any more unethical than him selling out to MS for his parked domains.
This is why I live in the .com.
Life in Orange County
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".
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
So did anyone register slashdot.eu yet?
If the .xxx ever gets implemented, this will be a good learning experience. You know there will be a massive dash for millions of xxx domains. Whoever gets to some first may become instant millionaires! I know I'll be going for bbqplate.xxx so I can show bbq porno to the masses!
Ninjas don't carry tic tacs
So GoDaddy got outsmarted by somebody who gamed the system and now they're whining about it in the CEO's blog. Kwticherbitchin and figure out how to make money, not whine over lost opportunities.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
The proper form is "NetCraft confirms it: .EU is dying"
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.
People are just too greedy these days.
Dave
----------------
www.da.eu
www.dav.eu
www.dave.eu
www.david.eu
... but this is what happens when you regulate a market. Yes it looked like a good idea on the surface. But it failed miserably. Markets NEED to be unregulated, people!
Well, at least I have no interest in these ridiculous domains.
Global warming is a cube.
Assuming every registrar was trying to register as fast as possible, it's basically functionally the same, just with some randomness in each "round" of registrations.
...
...
I.E., instead of (as the article put it):
ABCDE ABCDE ABCDE ABCDE
It's more like
ACDBE EBCDA BADCE CEABD
The TLD hijacking phenomenon that's a decade old profitable business model didn't suddenly stop that day. :-p
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
... why the existing domain registration process doesn't work.
Although it seems just as likely that European companies would scam the system as American ones.
Sooner or later some kind of crisis will happen that will bring about changes to the way that domain names are handled. As noted, three and four letter TLD names are already completely gone, with any reasonable new domain name likely already registered to a legitimate user, or to one of those idiot companies that "hold" names waiting for the highest bidder.
Changes are coming folks.
Three Squirrels
One thing that is not very clear to me is what kind of domains are them, as I've read in newspapers this two variants, and related webs don't make it clear:
* www.domain.country.eu (crap!)
* www.domain.eu (a lot more interesting).
Wich is the correct?
--
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to die it must have once lived
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
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.
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!
I'm not fat, just big boned...
But the other 99 fake registrars don't need to re-issue requests made by the others (whether granted or not). So they not only can make more requests per second, but those requests are more likely to be still available.
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.
This, of course, should surprise no one.
Governments auction off radio spectrum. There should be auctions for domain names with the money going into the public coffers, rather than being free money for registrars.
There seems to be a special place in the liberal heart for the notion of queues and everyone lining up for their "fair share" of whatever is being doled out. It sounds like a good idea in principle, but in practice this type of scheme inevitably falls victim to the realities of human nature. I remember experiencing something like this first hand when the housing authority at my university decided that a limited number of subsidized campus housing units would be doled out based upon a queue system. Of course, they thought that everyone would be nice and orderly, but in practice people camped outside the office for days before the rush began with one person "holding" spaces for twenty of his friends and people buying and selling places in line. They opened the process at midnight and everyone rushed the doors. The campus police were overwhelmed and they were lucky that there wasn't a riot. The point of all this is that the market has demonstrated time and again that queuing and rationing ultimately fail to satisfy anyone as somebody will always get the short end of the stick even though they would have paid more for item x than item y. Instead of trying to enforce some silly queuing system where people can and will find ways to cheat why did they not have an auction instead? Obviously some names like sex.eu are going to be worth hell of a lot more than blog.eu so why not let competing bidders determine exactly how much more? They could have used the proceeds to create a holding company for long term management of the domain and offer whatever names that were left at a fixed price. The conservative Europeans should have known better than to try and create a non-price based system that could not be abused by those crafty American companies and their high priced consultants.
So did Company X have to pay $10,000 for each bogus registrar they created? If so, isn't there some risk of them actually losing money on this scam? I realize some of these domain names will go for more than $10,000 a piece, but wouln't it be funny if the whole .eu TLD turns out to be a flop and Company X loses a ton of money on the deal. Assuming they registered 300 phantom registrars, that's $3 million in domain names they need to sell, not counting the $12.50 per name. I realize they probably will recoup tenfold and it's still pretty shady, but it seems to me there is still some risk for them.
Although upon re-reading the blog entry, it says a "deposit" of $10,000, which suggests to me that the $12.50 registration fees come out of this deposit. Can anyone clarify this?
It's because you ARE an isolated bumpkin American! :)
.com/.net/.whatever while almost everybody run a .dk domain as their main domain. Some have secured the .com counterpart and use it as a parked domain but it's ususally just companies that do business internationally.
.com is to US-based companies and believe me, there is some neat amounts of money involved when trading some domains. No, we're not talking sex.com amounts of money but still...
I work for a Danish webhosting company and we have very few customers that run their website off a
So yes - local tld's are just as important to companies all over the world as
I don't have the figures (any economists please? google?) but I am pretty sure that the Euro-zone of countries is now similar to North America in its size as a market for products. I'm pretty sure that countries in the Euro-zone often have similar product specifications due to common laws as well, so yup, I'd say branding your product as .eu is as important as a .com.
.com products, hey, I don't want to pay for a company to ship a paperback 3000 miles from the USA, I'd prefer them to post it from somewhere in the EU and charge me that instead (pretty well the same rate as from the UK). Don't have to pay import taxes either...
I'm in the UK and I purposely *avoid*
Unfair?
* People set up process that my 5-year old niece would have realized wouldn't work.
* Process doesn't work.
Seems pretty fair to me.
I'm pretty sure that spammers do as it's yet another TLD that is almost guaranteed to be completely absent from most major domain name based blocklists. Businesses will want their .EU domain to protect their brandnames, but never actually use them for anything, a few Europhiles and political entities will want one to fly the EU flag. Once it becomes a free-for-all though, I fully expect the bulk registration of disposable domain names and mass spamming to be begin turning it all to crap, just like happened with the .INFO domain.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
www.mondi.eu
Ok, that is probably not what you meant, but, hey, folks here hate them too.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
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.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Bob is not a man whom you can rely on. Just because he ain't getting nothing he is whining like a kid. Bob, your organisation enforces a law which I haven't seen into enforcement by any other registrar. As quoted by your office,
...As you are aware, we have modified our transfer-away policy to prevent transfer if registration contact information has changed within 60 days of the request...
Noah Plumb
Office of the President
President@GoDaddy.com
Bob's game plan, start being good with customers initially and once the business grows he is worse than NETSOL.
LOL, Check UK court cases
IIRC Lord McDonald of McDonald owns the McDonald name and all derivatives of it in the UK. I believe that got settled when McD's went after some small time eatery & the Lord stepped in and told them to piss off.
Could be interesting seeing McDonald (member of EU) vs. McDonald (US company) in that name grab.
Sounds like a great new banking system. I better go register that domain!
I was over at Godaddy this morning (what an amateurish name) getting annoyed at bad godaddy whois entry and commented on to the subject anyhow - He paid once to eurid, the new entrants paid more. If Mr Parsons was representing all 279 wannabe owners of sex.eu sob boohoo to them.
Mr Parsons may think its unfair that his 279 clients didnt get sex.eu but since theres a lot of dubious clients already on godaddy perhaps its good thing Parsons/godaddy screwed up.
Since this is a pretty obvious process, I guess it amounts to every registrar choosing how many chances in the landrush it wants to pay for... So what? Vetting individual registrars anyway would have been an messy procedure, the EU registry makes some money from the bogus registrations, and nobody knows if anyone will ever pay any sizable amount for a .eu domain.
A quick google search on
site:.eu
yields the following:
27 parked by DomainMonster
30 go to NetNames
28 to some unknown with the phrase "dominio parcheggiato" in it.
at 57,700 sites thus far, and an estimate 30 sites per registrars, it works out to about 1900 registrars as he suggests. Thats in line with the ~1200 he mentions in the article.
So google seems to agree with his article if the results are indicative of the true averages.
That's a shame. Hey Europe, welcome to the new
so, welcome to the
You are checking your backups, aren't you?
I've never really understood what's holding up the implementation of .us in the States. Here in Canada, there are a tremendous number of sites that are .ca (some the Canadian sites of a large multinational, others wholly Canadian sites), and there is NO negative stigma atached to a site in the .ca domain. Yes, it's aimed at Canadians: aren't there a great number of American sites aimed at Americans? .com is so over-utilized, you've go to register a 20-character domain to have anything remotely resembling your site's content or image. If you were to have .us opened up for registration, the confusion time and inferiority complex about the TLD would be minimal and fade quickly.
Look at the tomato! Isn't it sad? He can't dance! Poor tomato!
/random 100
Problem solved!
Wow, people are surprised by this result?
All that a queue system did was to create a different value structure. With the new rules in place, it would seem painfully clear to anyone with Econ 101 under their belt (and probably many people without it) that the queue meant that having more "places in line" would give you better value, for not much investment. Duh.
One of the things that capitalism does well is work *with* basic human nature. It is basic human nature to exploit the world for personal gain. Queues work against that by trying to be "fair" but instead simply modify the exploitation requirements. Now if they had *verified* the registrars status as legitimate businesses with working web sites and different phone numbers, it would have upped the difficulty of "gaming" the system. It would *not* have removed gaming though: I'm sure you would have simply seen a lot of home answering machines changed to answer as a business and a lot of throw away domains. Even having two chances per round would be a noticable improvement.
They would have been better off with a straight up auction: they would have made piles of money. No, auctions are not "fair": those with cash take the prizes. Duh again. How is that worse than what happend, where those who saw through the system exploited those who took the high road?
Sig under construction since 1998.
Let me say a naive thing: domain landrush? Screw all greedy corporations and cybersquatters.
Eat all you can, it doesn't matter. There will always be a free domain left for the next great idea.
Maybe something's wrong with my local DNS setup, but so far, the only actually working example for a .eu domain name I've seen was "eurid.eu"....
If it's so secret, then how come I've never heard of it?
What about Fred McDonald, Cindy Dunn and Dan Franklin? Hell what about insanely common names like Tony, Chang, Bob or Steven? I once talked a school teacher who had THREE Stevens, two Elizabeths and two Megans in one class for a whole school year. You can't use a lottery system for name purchasing simply because you want things to be 'fair.'
I say just give major companies first dibs if the address name is the same as the LEGALLY REGISTERED company name in that/those countries (Microsoft.eu, Apple.eu, Dell.eu, McDonalds.eu, etc) after that, its all free game. Right now what we're seeing is simple extortion. I was able to register X web address and now you need to pay me Y amount of money or I'll slander your company name for YEARS using the most obvious web address for your company. (Lindows anyone?)
I was a witness to the same kind of issue with Madonna selling her 30k tickets for her two shows in Montreal within 40 minutes (with online servers bogged down silly and people lining up a week in advance...) Why in the world aren't they auctionning those tickets? In an efficient market, she would get a major premium wherever she goes. She can redistribute that money if she doesn't need it (to me, for instance, or any other charitable cause). Fact is, many people are making money by reselling these tickets. I've seen prices in the thousands online!
I still think the best way to handle a "landrush" period as a new registry would be to:
...
.blah landrush!
1. Just turn on your registry and start taking registrations.. however, any domains registered in the first 30 (or whatever) days cost $5000/year (to the registrar) forever (at least until the registration ever lapses).. the registrars can charge whatever they want.
2. Publish that after 30 days, any new domains registered are $2500/year forever.
3. Publish that after 60 days, that price becomes $1000/year forever,
4. Publish that after 120 days, it becomes $500/year forever,
5. Eventually, there's a time, maybe after a year, where all new registrations are whatever your final price is going to be, $6/year or something.
I think this solves ALL the problems with new TLD land-rushes. It dramatically removes the incentives for domain-squatters, and pretty much maximizes revenues to the registry. It also lets them slowly scale up their back-end to deal as more and more people register domains. They also get the marketing benefit of like TEN mini-land-rushes.
So please, somebody, do this with the next
(I want to see if it works!)
America(ns) relegated ".com" to just mean ".com.us"
.com"
.cn? .ru? .uk? .fr? .de?
...
Everyone else works around that. This ('abuse', whatever, aside) is an example of that.
"pretty much any other TLD that isn't
ahem.
You might not see these tlds on a day to day basis, but then you're American
http://milkshake.dexy.org
Here is the list of .eu accredited registrars:
Registrars
And here are a few entries, cherry picked from the list (I went down the list until I saw a lot of "United States" registrars listed together, and looked at many of them.
One Penn Plaza, #6177
One Penn Plaza, #6177
One Penn Plaza, #6177
One Penn Plaza, #6177
One Penn Plaza, #6177
One Penn Plaza, #6177
One Penn Plaza, #6177
One Penn Plaza, #6177
One Penn Plaza, #6177
One Penn Plaza, #6177
Hopefully those links will still work when my jsessionid expires, but removing it from the links wasn't working. (There were other addresses/phone #s that showed up in a lot of registrars, but that one is very easy to spot going down the list)
I ordered six domains through netsol and didn't get one. Maybe this explains it.
ian
I have no particular expertise or registry space, so please be kind if I make obvious mistakes. .xxx, anyone?
Is there no one at ICANN to complain to? When tlds are given out to registries, does oversight go out the window?
Clearly GoDaddy is losing money to Company X, but the biggest losers have got to be the Europeans, as Parsons mentions. Why is Internet governance so hard? There isn't a week that goes by when slashdot doesn't have another article about how _someone_ has screwed the pooch on DNS.
Do the large registrars have enough muscle to actually get ICANN to work out these problems? Or are you loathe to do so because ICANN lays the golden eggs in addition to crapping all over the place?
Maybe I'm totally off center - maybe this is an isolated incident. But if not, might it be time to address the root causes?
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?
I own iheartjes.us you insensitive clod!
Get your Unix fortune now!
Isn't .us available for registration right now?
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
The totally ridiculous part about this is that the speculators have no preference as to what they gobble up--not even a look at what the domain is. Case in point: I used to own squirreltweezers.com because it was a totally dumb name. No meaning. Nothing. However, the second it became available, some squatter snapped it up, like they're going to make some money off of it.
I think we should line these squatters up and slap them until they can't see straight any more.
Grammar Lesson: you're is a contraction of "you are"; your means you possess something; yore means days gone by.
Why on earth would you want a top level domain to describle the geographical location of the site? This is the internet! You can go anywhere. florida.us? That's a six hour plane journey! I'm not going there!
And, out of interest, do you have any statistics as to how many of those are held by real people/companies, and how many by cybersquatters? I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people had just trawled for the top few thousand domain names in the .com namespace and tried to register their .eu equivalent on the off-chance that they can make a killing selling a few of them.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
IANAL, but I believe that the truth is only a defense to slander. Libel is an intentional tort one of the elements of which is malice. True written malicious words may be true and still be libel.
Anybody that watched the .info fiasco knows this.
Sunrise period allows big business to overreach their trademark rights.
Those running the whole scheme are just concerned with making the most amount of money with least costs.
WIPO.org.uk - skilful.com - WoolwichSucks.org.uk
Adding new TLDs is doing nothing except generating revenue for the registrars.
.com address registered the .eu address as well. There were no checks to see if the person registering the domain was actually in Europe, so the .eu landrush was actually many American companies registering companyname.eu so nobody else does.
.com TLD or will buy their name from wholesale squatters. But you've gotta have the .com before you'll buy the .eu.
Pretty much any reasonably sized company who owns a
The most this will be useful for is to host a website for the european arm of a large multinational corporation (which formerly would be served by a "Choose your region" screen.) Anyone who wants to set up a unique presence will do it on a domain name which is not registered in the
I'm not European. I don't plan on being European. So who cares if they're 'registrars' ? They could be fake fronts for big name US companies. It still doesn't change the fact that I don't own a car.
ICANN slaps up a new TLD pretty quick when it starts to get traction in non-ICANN controled DNS system.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
What makes you think there is a substantial difference?
I thought the requirements to get a .ca were pretty draconian; to the point that most Canadian business can't qualify and end up in the .com.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
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
Comment removed based on user account deletion
>the most notorious being a company I'll call company "X" - which is believed to be backed by North
>American mega-millionaires -- saw a loophole in the process.
wtf? company x? Just say who the fuck it is you are talking about.
Hmmm, these companies need not file SEC forms if they aren't publically traded or aren't US companies. Dotster, for example, appears to be privately held.
This is off topic, but I'll say this about the original article:
If you need to put a sentence describing the point of the paragraph in bold before the paragraph itself, it's a sign that you need to rewrite the paragraph.
"You can justify anything by putting it in quotes, adding a famous name and making it a sig" - Albert Einstein
Well, seems GODADDY at least doesn't let EU registrations if you don't live in EU.
EMail: 0110001101100010010000000110001101110010 0110000101111010011011100110000101110010 0010111001100011011011110110
Registrations made by a bogus registrar would be declared null and void. Registrants who used that registrar would be asked to nominate another registrar through which to re-register up to only two domains. (thus penalizing people who used phantom registrars to game the system, but allowing innocent bystanders some hope of justice). Excess registrations would be placed back in the pool for a second 'gold rush'.
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.
... but I'm not.
All's true that is mistrusted
Let me see if I understand. You're suggesting that queue systems are innately flawed, and that market forces are better. To demonstrate this flaw, we should consider an example -- oh, say, the case of using a queue to allocate subsidized housing at Foo University in the year 19xy. Oh, my! Those students did misbehave! Queues are bad, so we should use the proposed alternative: market forces.
.eu domains.
Market forces are a patently ludicrous solution for the example. If students could afford housing at market rates, then they wouldn't need subsidies. If the University felt that market forces provided fair and socially desirable outcomes, then it wouldn't provide subsidies. The example doesn't help the argument.
If anything, it hurts: as a reader, I'm no longer thinking about European companies trying to build online brands (something for which pure market forces might be good) -- I'm thinking about college students, education, and social darwinism. The parent has created a rhetorical knot which I must undo before I can accept that auctions would improve the allocation of
The good ole "Dot Com of A"
Legally I mean.
It is far from clear for me. It is obvious that the EURid rules were really horrible things but if they were no more specific than reprinted on these blogs these companies may be perfectly within the rules.
After all if I am some domain registrar the rules don't seem to prevent me from creating 500 new companies, each of which has me as it's only customer, and use them to buy up names. After all each of these companies is genuienly intending to become a registrar, just of only a few names and is trivially giving all it's customers access to these domains since it only has one customer.
Maybe the formal rules were more specific but as it is it is far from clear these companies were violating any rules.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
Looks like they could learn from John Nash.
It's just north of Factoria Mall, and definitely a suburban environment with houses on all sides. It's a gray two-story house, the only one on a downward-sloped street (SE 22nd Pl). Pretty good acreage. A Chevy Blazer in need of washing was parked in the driveway. I would've gotten some photos, but my cell phone battery died while cruising Crossroads Mall on Saturday (poor Verizon reception on an Audiovox CDM-8900), sorry.
As for who it is... Name Intelligence has some history and the whois info matches.
If the ones in Bellevue/98008 weren't all PO Box 7449, I'd visit them on Thursday. As it is, eNombre seems awfully similar in name to eNom, which itself has five siblings.
An obvious tip for those using the Advanced Search: it gives the registrars in chronological order, so you can look in your status bar at the numbers to see which were applied for together.
What I find odd is that the New York ones, e.g. GoDog, can't be found by Advanced Search or in the Alphabetical list. Collusion?
Copyrights, Patents, Trademarks: temporary loans from the Public Domain, not real property ("intellectual" or otherwise)
when I saw what was happening with the dotEU domains, I posted the following on another board --
not surprising -- I did a check of those registrars offering the dotEU domains and it seems as if every hairdresser, pooodle walker and blogger has signed up as resellers of these domains --
problem is, in a spot check of several of the hormngous list of them, I found they seem to be gouging for the registration fee, and many don't provide any web space or anything else -- 25 euros and more does not seem to be a good price, considering all the domains one can find for 8 buckies or less, some even for free -- but then again I find that european buyers, even on ebay, don't seem to be as bottom trawling as most seem to be here in lalaLandia, so they don't seem to care what they pay for their new unified top level domain
to:info@eurid.eu
.EU landrush applications, and were not previously active domain name registrars. This will eliminate hundreds of registrars. .EU domain names registered by decredited registrars.
Subject: Scam
Guys shame on you! you should all be fired and put to prison for fraud!
How much money did they pay you to do this? Who are they?
unless you do the following:
1. Complete the landrush process.
2. Temporarily freeze all registrations until they can examine all registrars to be sure that they are genuine, and actually are in the business of securing domain registrations.
3. Decredit all registrars that were accredited but did not actually take
4. Cancel all
5. Unfreeze the names registered during the original landrush process by the remaining accredited registrars.
6. Conduct a second landrush process for the remaining accredited registrars, allowing everyone access to the canceled registrations.
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
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
The 4 million domain names that Nominet mentions, only includes the .co.uk, org.uk, net.uk, plc.uk, ltd.uk, me.uk, sch.uk. Domains such as ac.uk, gov.uk, nhs.uk, mod.uk are managed by a different organisation (Janet I believe) and are not counted in this list. So there are more than 4 million UK domain names.
Why not add other TLDs? Why not a .mov/.movie TLD? or a .zoo? or .radio? or ...? TLDs are just an administrative organization. There can be as many as ICANN/whoever wants. And limiting the number of TLDs only serves to up the price.
The shame is when it could be done right (years ago) making strict rules for every TLD they instead thought with their pockets. Today, every TLD is populated by not related to the TLD domains (org, net, tv).
I remember registring domains that I though sounded cool back in the dot-bomb days. Except for maybe one, they still wouldn't be occupied today. I recently registred a quite cool .com name that I want for a project. I usually take me 5 minutes to come up with a unique name that's easy to use and not occupied by anyone else who is a serious competition in the field. What'st the big fuss? A friend of mine spent 200 Euro to buy a german word domain.
Who cares? No one. The most famous URL is google.com. I doupt a registrar would have that in his portfolio if they'd start their company today.
I hope all registrars go broke. But I guess as long as people are willing to shell out $$ for cooldomain.com they will make money. Stupid people.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Although you don't say, I'm going to guess that all four records point to the same physical AND virtual server, AND that your weblogs do not record significant traffic on all four, but that almost all of it comes in on a single name. The other three would then be of historic interest, but not much more.
Having said all that, it's close enough to the two or so name limit I suggested that I'd consider it passable, just not good practice.
But four names isn't where the real problem lies. There are companies with many tens or even many hundreds of names. This is where namespace pollution is a serious problem, and where no amount of justification could possibly excuse all of those names. When you get that many names bought, it is typically for defensive or hostile purposes, it is NOT for the object of making things easier or more rational. I would argue that the DNS tables are no more a place for inter-corporate warfare than the phone directory, and that those who would seek to use DNS for such purposes should be turfed off the DNS heirarchy altogether. The infrastructure is far too important and valuable to sacrifice to corporate IT militias.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
See... If the government would just give away free money, then things people wouldn't do things like this...