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

Go figure...

[Disavian]

If there's a way to cheat, it will be found.

"DNS servers too busy"

[SonicBlue]

I ordered mine a week ago, still haven't gotten it. Bah.

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

[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.

Re:That is BS

[LunaticTippy]

I do understand it.

No, you don't.

That is misleading, the point is each of the registrars have equal change of connecting make request every second.

A registrar following the spirit of the rules has 1 request/sec.
A registrar with 99 fraud registrars has 100 request/sec.

Think of the line as 1 second. Every time you make a request you go to the end of the "line." Someone with 99 shell registrars goes to the end of the "line." By the time he gets to the front of the 1 second line, their 99 other requests have also been processed.

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.

sour grapes?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:sour grapes?

[E IS mC(Square)]

So what? Even if its a case of sour grapes, if that has happened (and I have no reason to believe that it has not happened), then its WRONG.

We all know how valueable domain names are. I thought somebody would have learnt the lesson watching lawsuits after lawsuits on domain names, and would be extra careful while distributing a new list. But no. We continue to let system fuck itself.

This is why....

[SpaceCadetTrav]

This is why I live in the .com.

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:Umm...

[SatanicPuppy]

It is pretty sad, but, from experience, as soon as you start telling your superiors it won't work "because of human nature", you're already screwed. You have to make something up like, "We can't do it this way because our systems will be swamped by the massive server traffic."

I'd have set it up so that people had to apply to be able to register, so that they'd be able to weed out the illegit registrars, then I'd make everyone submit their lists, in order of preference, and work my way down.

Making it spammable is just begging for trouble.

slashdot.eu

[fusto99]

So did anyone register slashdot.eu yet?

Re:slashdot.eu

[cashman73]

Yup. Somebody named, "Caller Robin," in London got it on April 7.

Good leaning experience for .xxx

[MooseTick]

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!

Who said business is fair?

[winkydink]

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.

Re:Who said business is fair?

[Ignignot]

Their approach was actually slightly different - they warned the EU that this was going to happen, and then they didn't perform the same gaming because it is unethical. They are betting that the EU will turn around and take the domains away from unethical companies, and then redo the process with the new domains. Their goal now is to force the EU to kick out the unethical companies. They have a longer term outlook than the jerks who tried to cheat the system.

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.

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?

Re:Who said business is fair?

[frank_adrian314159]

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?

I don't know... There are several people from Nigeria who write every day wanting to share their wealth with me! Some of them are moving to Russia, too, because I get emails from them also!

Re:The message is clear:

[Chris Pimlott]

The proper form is "NetCraft confirms it: .EU is dying"

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.

Pisses me off...

[oO_oO_Dave_Oo_Oo]

People are just too greedy these days.

Dave
----------------
www.da.eu
www.dav.eu
www.dave.eu
www.david.eu

In other news...

[Jugalator]

The TLD hijacking phenomenon that's a decade old profitable business model didn't suddenly stop that day. :-p

Re:But what is it?

[therealnospam]

The second is correct.

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.

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!

Not only that

[0xABADC0DA]

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.

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:Why not auction them off?

[bheer]

The problem with your appeoach is that it makes the Internet a haven for those with money. Sure, money talks on the net, but much less than in any other medium -- which is why Amnesty, Greenpeace, DemocracyUnderground etc find it most convenient to disseminate their message online.

If we had a domain name auction system, how'd you like to bet the government of China would snap up rights to amnesty.org?

wow!

[cashman73]

Wow! According to whois.eu, there's been 281 applications received for sex.eu ! 71 applications for porn.eu .

This, of course, should surprise no one.

Auction

[ortcutt]

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.

The Problem with Queuing

[CodeBuster]

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.

Re:The Problem with Queuing

[oh_my_080980980]

Your post is one incredible troll. Insightful! Please.

If had bothered to come down from your ivory tower and read the blog, you would understand the problem was bogus registrars appearing at the last minute with many being THE SAME COMPANY! They were bogus because they were not real registrars but rather companies squating on a domain name. If the EURID had bothered to do a background check on these companies, they could have prevented the abuse of the system. EURID can still fix the problem but they show no willingness to do so.

Re:The Problem with Queuing

[nagora]

with one person "holding" spaces for twenty of his friends

Try that in a queue in Northern Ireland and you'll have one person holding twenty teeth in their hands, and rightly so.

TWW

Re:The Problem with Queuing

[CodeBuster]

They were bogus because they were not real registrars but rather companies squating on a domain name.

The auction system solves this problem because in the end somebody has to pay from a verified line of credit. Thus, it doesn't matter how many proxies somebody uses because they still have to cough up the money when the hammer falls. The post was made out of frustration because people keep trying the same things that always fail and wonder why they fail. There is no suggestion of ivory tower here...auctions can and do solve these types of problems every day in the real world without resorting to some complex and ultimately futile non-money based system that is proof against all cheating.

Re:The Problem with Queuing

[CodeBuster]

How about having a week-long period where everyone requests all the domains they want, then for names with multiple requests, randomly picking a winner who pays the same flat rate as everyone else

The company in question set up one hundred proxies who all could have entered the drawing one time and given this company a 100 to 1 advantage over the non cheaters. This same phenomenon often occurs in elections, especially in poorer countries with entrenched corruption, where the ballot box is "stuffed" with entries filled out by phantom voters. As for the opportunistic vs the wealthy the two are very often one in the same or at least they tend to become the same over the long run.

Re:The Problem with Queuing

[Jetson]

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.

Concert tickets used to go like that, too, until most ticket agents got tired of having dirty, smelly people in sleeping bags in front of their store for several days every time a big-name band tour was announced. Many of them have implimented a "Now Serving..." kind of scheme where you drop in any time prior to the ticket sale date and get your queue number. When the tickets finally go on sale, the manager picks a queue number at random and the sales go circular from there. That way the crowd doesn't have to arrive until just before the sale starts, and there's no rushing the door because you can't buy a ticket until it's your turn.

Of course, Ticketmaster's online sales system has removed most of that problem by implimenting an on-line land-rush system. :-/

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

[mpapet]

Markets NEED to be unregulated

It is "unregulated" because there probably are no meaningful consequences to gaming the system. Today's lesson:

1. It's only wrong if someone gets caught.
2. If they get caught, then so what? They've got more domain names than the next guy so they win.
3. The person with most gold rules.

This highlights one of the consequences of a capitalist society. Now, you may say, "So what! At least I get a chance in a capitalist society because there's more opportunity"

But competition is not welcome in a capitalist system. Mature markets evolve to a duopoly/monopoly because the market winners actively supress competition and thereby foster inefficient markets. Thus inspiring regulations to prevent the formation of monopolies.

I urge you to challenge your own assumptions about "free markets." There's lots of meaningful opinions on both sides. You need to know both.

Euro-zone is a big market (bigger than US?)

[fantomas]

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.

I'm in the UK and I purposely *avoid* .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...

Unfair?

[mattwarden]

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.

Re:Who cares?

[Zocalo]

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.

May I Be The First To Say...

[Anonymous Coward]

www.mondi.eu

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

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.

Re:I'd argue that...

[rainman_bc]

Nobody has any business buying more than one or two domain names anyway.

Dunno about that. With cyber squaters who capitalize on misspelled url's, it seems in a business's interest to try to grab every possible typo version of their business name too...

Re:I'd argue that...

[ottffssent]

I would agree with your assertion that more subdomains should be used, and that movies are a particularly obvious and egregious example. The switch from moviename.TLD to movienameTHEMOVIE.TLD is an early sign that even those with deep pockets are feeling the crunch. One solution would be moviename.movies.TLD, but of course everyone would object to whoever owns .movies.TLD. Which doesn't affect any studio with the balls to just use moviename.studioname.TLD

Unfortunately, your (and my) opinion that more subdomains should be used is just a consequence of the way the internet's run. Consumers are conditioned to expect blah.TLD as a domain name and to be distrustful of long names (with some justification). Having made the conceptual leap that not all domains ending in .com are safe, and recognizing that longer names are more likely to be, in some poorly-understood way, "bad", it's going to be difficult to get people to accept the logical extension of subdomains: buzzlightyear.actionfigures.merchandise.movies.dis ney.com

Ultimately, the problem is one of control, whether that's self-control or regulatory control. Every time a new TLD opens up, there's the same rush to buy the same domains with another TLD. Why are there country code TLDs? Well, because the USA dominated the early internet and claimed all of .gov for itself. Any rational organization would have put all national governments under .gov, so you'd see navy.mil.us.gov on the same footing as raf.mil.uk.gov. As we've seen, the early lack of foresight in claiming .gov for the USA has resulted in hundreds of country code TLDs, which has benefited countries whose code happens to have some use to foreigners (.tv, for example), but is a net loss in terms of overall rationality.

The namespace has been so poorly managed in the past that it's difficult to exert the necessary control to maintain order. The only positive outcome of that is that there's a reluctance to change, allowing us to become reasonably comfortable with the status quo. Earlier in the internet's development, a different approach to TLDs would have helped whereas today it can only waste more money. Fortunately, if the limited number of TLDs remains small, the overall anarchy can be masked by tighter local control. For an example of that, see the .us domain. Consider the URL for my local library system: www.scls.lib.wi.us. The South Central Library System is a library entity in Wisconsin, which is in the US. Or my home county's webpage: www.co.dane.wi.us. Other than having the CO and DANE in the wrong order, it's the model of rationality. If we can keep the number of TLDs down we will allow such islands of order to exist where they can still be reasonably found.

It's fairly clear that increasing the number of TLDs only marginally increases the number of websites. Most of the .eu domains will end up being the same as existing .com domains. In turn, most of these will in fact be the same page as the .com domains, with a few being owned by the same company and presenting substantially the same information with a more locally-appropriate flavor. Only a few will be completely separate (say, two small companies with the same name in geographically diverse areas). In other words, there is little need for something like a .eu TLD. Most of the blah.eu domains would more properly be served by eu.blah.TLD instead, and the primary result of the existence of .eu is to funnel money into the coffers of those involved in setting up and running the TLD, without creating commensurate value.

I hope that increased reliance on search engines to find desired content will diminish the perceived value of a domain name, with the result that branding and marketing will have less input in the choice of naming, thus hopefully leading to gradually more hierarchical namespaces. At best, that's a long-term goal, and I'm sure it will be preceeded by smaller-scale campaigns to standardize and/or rationalize naming within individiual entities. One example of this would be the namespaces Apple uses internal to OS X.

List of registrars shows the phantoms

[tigertiger]

The list of registrars is actually available only, and it is pretty obvious that the system is being played by some companies - you can usually tell from the address who they are... United Domains of Starnberg, Germany, e.g. is using plant names ( peach-europe Ltd ).

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.

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?

Re:What about them?

[MMaestro]

Why the bias toward companies? I "legally" have my own name in my home country.

No you don't. If my name is Steven does that mean I get to reserve steven.com? What if I immigrated to the EU or had my citizenship changed, do I get to reserve steven.eu or steven.cn or steven.hk as well?

Heck I should charge people for using the name 'Steven' because its "legally" mine! /sarcasm

You have two and ONLY two "fair" choices... Pure random lottery, or first-come-first-serve.

Or you could let people and companies petition beforehand to reserve certain web addresses. Microsoft Corp.? Fine, they get microsoft.eu. Joe McDonald, age 19 lives with his parents wants mcdonalds.eu? Uh, no. Apple Corp. and Paul McCartney in contest over apple.eu? We'll place that on hold until the courts can make a decision. Joe Somebody wants imasuperl33td00d.eu? Fine, whatever.

If I own something that you want and I don't want to give it to you, that does not count as extortion.

Except you're seeing PRIVATE INDIVIDUALLY charging MILLIONS of dollars for web names. Face it, the majority of these .eu web address purchase rushes are for the purpose of extortion. Apple.eu, Microsoft.eu and Dell.eu would all fetch a couple million easy. They're all multi-BILLION dollar companies, a few million is not that hard to squeeze out of them.

It does not bother me in the least if someone other than IBM owns ibm.eu.

And if you're the CEO of IBM and people start complaining about a picture of a kitten on fire posted on ibm.eu who do you think they're going to bitch to first? As a private citizen, you're not even worth a memo compared to these multibillion dollar companies. No one visits johnjackson.com but THOUSANDS of people visit ibm.com DAILY.

if someone wants to pay $10 a year waiting for hell to freeze over before I offer to take it off their hands, well, their money to waste.

Reports of people selling web addresses that were nothing more than family names for tens of thousands was common in the '90s. Where have you been for the past ten years?

Okay - So who gets Apple.eu? Paul McCartney or Steve Jobs?

Let the courts figure that out. They're what they're for.

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

Re:What about them?

[pla]

No you don't. If my name is Steven does that mean I get to reserve steven.com?

I didn't claim that gave me the "right" to reserve my name - Quite the opposite, a point with which you apparently agree... No, I don't automatically get "steven.com". Neither does "SteveCorp" or "Three Steves, Inc", or even "Steve Jobs".


Joe McDonald, age 19 lives with his parents wants mcdonalds.eu? Uh, no.

With an "s" at the end, I would tend to agree that if we accept the idea of "rights" to a name, he wouldn't get "mcdonalds.eu". What about "mcdonald.eu"?


Joe Somebody wants imasuperl33td00d.eu? Fine, whatever.

And if Walmart, however unlikely this may seem, decides to change its name to "imasuperl33td00d-mart"?

I don't think you get my point - Arguing that companies get first dibs counts as not only arbitrary, but a sharply anti-human sentiment.

I proposed nothing more radical than putting we mere living breathing evolved inhabitants of this planet back on par with FICTIONAL entities, and it truly, truly saddens me that people would defend fiction over their own species.


Okay - So who gets Apple.eu? Paul McCartney or Steve Jobs? Let the courts figure that out. They're what they're for.

Okay, you still miss the point - BOTH companies chose a name that already exists as a common English word for a fruit, and not-coincidentally occurs near the beginning of the alphabet. The fruit existed first. People with the surname existed second. The companies came LAST. Why does the company (whichever wins in court) get preference on the domain name? And if you answer "the law says so", consider me dissapointed.

I would agree with you if - and only if - companies had to pick names that do not exist as words in any "natural" language. Xerox would satisfy that (though I personally would still say they can enter the drawing for that domain name with everyone else); Anything presumptuous enough to call itself "Apple" or "Jones" or "McDonalds" can go pound sand.


Apple.eu, Microsoft.eu and Dell.eu would all fetch a couple million easy.

If those companies value those domain names that highly, I fail to see the problem with them, if luck doesn't shine on them in the name drawing, having to pay whatever they will and whatever the "winner" wants. We call it "capitalism", not "extortion" (though I realize this involves the EU, so take that as you will).


As a private citizen, you're not even worth a memo compared to these multibillion dollar companies.

So you do understand my point - Yet you still argue in their favor? Why?

They would't piss on your grave to save your life, but you want to do them a favor by making sure no one can confuse the corporate equivalent of "Bill Jones" with "Bill Cones" or "Jill Jones"?

Hey, I don't think highly of our species either, but I won't betray the whole race in favor of fiction that, under OPTIMAL conditions would see us all work for nothing (aka "slavery") just to survive and buy (with what money?) their products.


Where have you been for the past ten years?

Learning how much Corporate America (tm) cares about their employees (Enron), consumers (RIAA), and the incidental victims (Firestone, ne Bridgestone) of their actions. Under which rock have YOU hidden that you still trust Bill Gates to act in your best interest?



As an aside, which you may or may not consider relevant - I consider domain squatters right up there with spammers and virus authors as the scum of the Earth. But to call any system that favors fictional entities over humans; that favors the "biggest" user of a name; that favors the deepest pockets, "fair"? That doesn't solve the problem, it just describes one symptom of the societal psychosis that allows the problem to exist in the first place.

I visited one. It's a HOUSE!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Today, after work, I visited the closest one to me: the one with 22 entries found by Postal Code=98005 and City=Bellevue. All seem to lead to the same address: 12806 SE 22nd Pl.

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.

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

But then...

[jd]

...all that happens is that all the major companies buy an identical set of names in ALL top level domains of any significance, eliminating any value in having them. You shouldn't need a .com and a .com.au, because one is merely going to be a pointer to the other. It doesn't add anything of value, but does cost money and does use up namespace.

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.