Kevin Ohashi - Entrepreneur I Love Learning New Things.

A business networking platform, blockchain company and tire company bought domain names.

Coffee is for closers, and Sedo closed a nice sale of Closers.com this week at $50,000.

The seller was David Wieland, who also recently put Austin.com on the block. It looks like he acquired Closers.com in late 2012 for $32,000. That’s an annualized return of about 8.5% before considering commissions.

Unfortunately, we don’t know who the buyer is yet.

The top sale I can connect to an end user is ExpertMatch.com. I tried to buy this domain a couple of years ago but the owner told me it wasn’t for sale.

Here’s a list of some of the end user sales at Sedo over the past week. You can see more lists like this here.

ExpertMatch.com $19,000 – Business networking platform Xing.

Colors.org $12,500 – Color is a blockchain platform.

Network.co.uk £9,800 – Network Computing Limited in the UK uses the domain name network-computing.co.uk.

OpenDining.com $5,752 – OpenNetworks runs an online ordering system for restaurants at OpenDining.net.

Falken.com €4,500 – Falken Tyre Europe GmbH is a European tire company. (Or Tyre, if you must.)

Cashair.com €4,000 – The owner of cashair.solutions. That domain name doesn’t host a website yet.

Meero.com $4,000 – Photography service Meero upgraded from Meero.io to Meero.com. It is forwarding the .io domain name to the new .com.

Salam.io $3,499 – Salam is a chat app.

DezignFormat.com $3,000 – Dezign Format Pte Ltd in Singapore uses the domain name DezignFormat.com.sg.

FirstCompanion.com $2,399 – First Companion is a pet food brand. The .com now forwards to the .net.

HST.co.uk £2,250 – High Spec Tech LTD is a phone repair company.

Hedone.com €2,000 – Hedone Cafe is a coffee company that uses the domain name HedoneCafe.ro.

CriticalMix.fr $2,000 – CriticalMix is a data analytics company.

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Related posts:

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2. What domain names Goldman Sachs and others bought this week
3. More end user domain name sales

An NAF panelist is very generous is accepting common law trademark rights.

A National Arbitration Forum panelist recently awarded the domain name YouAreOK.com to T & P Holding Company, LLC. This company owns several hair salons and boutiques in Nashville under the name Local Honey. Its website is LHNashville.com.

The domain name owner, Ancient Holdings, LLC, has lost a handful of UDRP cases over the years. It also didn’t respond to the dispute. These factors certainly weighed against the registrant.

But I’m concerned that this case got past the first prong of UDRP: that the domain name is identical or confusingly similar to a mark in which the complainant has rights.

A complainant can show that it has registered rights in a mark or that it has common law rights in the mark. The UDRP itself does not spell out how common law rights can be proven, but the WIPO Jurisprudential Overview 3.0 has a good overview of standard practice:

To establish unregistered or common law trademark rights for purposes of the UDRP, the complainant must show that its mark has become a distinctive identifier which consumers associate with the complainant’s goods and/or services.

Relevant evidence demonstrating such acquired distinctiveness (also referred to as secondary meaning) includes a range of factors such as (i) the duration and nature of use of the mark, (ii) the amount of sales under the mark, (iii) the nature and extent of advertising using the mark, (iv) the degree of actual public (e.g., consumer, industry, media) recognition, and (v) consumer surveys.

(Particularly with regard to brands acquiring relatively rapid recognition due to a significant Internet presence, panels have also been considering factors such as the type and scope of market activities and the nature of the complainant’s goods and/or services.)

Specific evidence supporting assertions of acquired distinctiveness should be included in the complaint; conclusory allegations of unregistered or common law rights, even if undisputed in the particular UDRP case, would not normally suffice to show secondary meaning. In cases involving unregistered or common law marks that are comprised solely of descriptive terms which are not inherently distinctive, there is a greater onus on the complainant to present evidence of acquired distinctiveness/secondary meaning…

The YouAreOK.com case was filed at National Arbitration Forum, not WIPO. But panelists often hear cases for both of these forums and it’s important to have consistency across them.

T & P Holding Company filed a trademark with the US Patent and Trademark Office in March of this year, after filing the UDRP. The trademark claims first use in 2010. For the UDRP, T & P relied on common law trademark rights.

Panelist John Upchurch found T & P’s evidence to be compelling:

Complainant provides screenshots of its website and social media posts indicating it uses the mark. See Compl. Ex. 2. Complainant does not provide other evidence to support its claim of common law rights. The Panel finds Complainant’s contentions to be sufficient, and concludes that Complainant has established common law rights per Policy 4(a)(i) by showing the YOU ARE OK mark has taken on a secondary meaning in association with Complainant’s business.

I don’t know what exhibits T & P provided to the panel, but it’s probably very similar to the specimens submitted to the USPTO, which you can see here (2MB PDF).

These images use the term You Are OK in very recent social media posts and a screen capture from LHNashville.com.  You’ll note that none of the uses in the specimens use a TM symbol.

I did a Google site search on LHNashville.com today for “Your are OK”. Two items came up.

One is the site’s blog, which has a title tag that says “You are OK.” The blog contains profiles of people with “Name is OK” as the title for each one. The other is for the home page that was submitted to the USPTO. I can’t find the text that was submitted to the USPTO on Local Honey’s home page when I visit it, though.

A company doesn’t have to use a trademark on its website to have a trademark. Still, it would need to provide good evidence to the panel of its use of the trademark and when it is conceivable that the holder gained common law rights to the mark.

That brings up the issue of dates when it comes to registration in bad faith. T & P claims it began using the mark in 2010.

I performed the site search for dates prior to 2015. Google returned zero results.

In fact, the domain name LHNashville.com wasn’t registered until 2014. T & P Holding company wasn’t organized in Tennessee until 2013. (Oddly, its trademark application says it’s organized in the US Virgin Islands.) However, I found evidence that the company might have been operating its salons in 2010 based on an old cancellation policy document.

The domain name itself was registered in 2009. The current registrant didn’t acquire it until later, but the case doesn’t address the fact that the claimed rights post-date the registration of the domain. So the case also should have addressed this timeline in the bad faith portion.

I’ve seen many stronger common law trademark claims denied in UDRPs for not providing enough evidence, such as proof of marketing expenditures related to the mark.

Even if common law rights were proven, it seems unlikely that the domain registrant could have been aware of them when it registered the domain.

Consistency is important in UDRP. I do not think this case was consistent with general standards for showing common law rights.

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Sale of vacation.rentals eclipses home.loans sale.

A vacation rental company has paid $500,300 to acquire the domain name vacation.rentals from registry Donuts in an all-cash transaction. This is the highest publicly reported sale of a second level domain under a new top level domain name to date.

Vacarent, LLC is a vacation rental company that hopes to capitalize on growing frustrations with Airbnb and HomeAway. The company won’t charge commissions and instead will just charge annual subscription fees to homeowners. This was the model HomeAway followed for many years before switching to a transaction-based model.

HomeAway acquired the established business VacationRentals.com in 2007 for $35 million. The CEO of the company in 2007, Brian Sharples, indicated that it was mostly to keep it out of its competitor’s hands and a big part of that was the domain name.

Search for vacation rentals on Google today and VacationRentals.com comes up #1. But Vacarent says it hopes the vacation.rentals domain name will help it slowly chip away at the organic listings.

Creating a marketplace is difficult, so search engine rankings will need to be a key part of vacation.rental’s strategy to attract homeowners and renters.

The deal was brokered by Uniregistry broker Brooke Hernandez late last year.

You might notice that the sales price is $300 more than the record-setting sale of home.loans last year. That’s likely not a coincidence.

There are just over 12,000 .rentals domains active in zone files according to nTLDstats.

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2. New TLD auction prices hitting highs: Minds + Machines, Uniregistry, Donuts all win some domains
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Lots of domain names related to the video game are registered in .com.

Verisign has published its list of the top trending keywords in .com registrations for last month.

Coming in at number 3 is Fortnite. Most of the domain names are related to Epic Games’ Fortnite video game.

Here are the top ten trending words in new .com registrations last month:

1. President
2. Passion
3. Fortnite
4. Vietnam
5. Fairy
6. Rates
7. Jumbo
8. Residential
9. Rights
10. Grit

These are not the most common words in .com registrations. Those are terms like “home” and “online”. Instead, these represent the terms that had the biggest percentage increase in registrations from February to March.

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ICANN should be a boring organization but it hired people who want to make a difference.

I visited ICANN’s offices in California in 2008. That was well before ICANN’s finances ballooned. There were fewer than 100 employees back then.

I’d characterize ICANN in 2008 as boring. It was a small organization that was just making sure the domain name system worked.

Then something happened. The company started hiring the wrong type of people. It started hiring people that don’t want to do boring work. People who want to make a name for themselves. It hired people who want to be at the helm of a growing organization that takes on an important role in the world.

Perhaps it started with Rod Beckstrom, a CEO obsessed with his personal brand. Then Fadi Chahade, another person who wouldn’t take a role that wasn’t exciting and important.

Hiring people that want to make a difference is usually a good thing, but not for an organization that should be boring.

The size of ICANN has tripled between my visit to ICANN and now. It grew its international presence. It lobbied more. It got involved in an ever-growing list of activities. It recruited lots of people that are used to $300k+ a year comp plans and assistants.

It was no longer a boring organization. And that has become a problem.

Looked at in the best possible light, you can argue that the group’s growing list of activities over the past decade has been at the behest of the community. ICANN has trouble saying no and has taken on an ever-increasing workload.

And perhaps its international expansion was necessary to keep the web from splintering. It needed to make the world believe that ICANN was not a puppet of the United States so that other countries wouldn’t wrestle control away from ICANN.

At first, new top level domain names masked the organization’s growth. The “cost-neutral” program brought in a lot of cash that allowed it to hire more people.

Then the bubble burst as new TLDs came out with a whimper. The companies that paid millions to ICANN for new domains began to struggle and their annual payments to ICANN were based on minimums rather than high transaction rates.

While these new TLD companies cut costs in response, ICANN continued to grow. You can only do that for so long.

So now we’re at a point where the money is running out–at least on paper when you ignore the huge cashpile of new TLD auction proceeds that is reserved for allocation by the community.

I don’t envy the situation new CEO Göran Marby found himself in when he took over in 2016. He came into an organization that was spending beyond its means, all the while missing the urgency of one of the biggest issues to face ICANN’s contracted parties in the past decade: the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Even though the problems originated before his arrival, it was disheartening to read his take on how costs can be cut. He said 80-85 percent of the FY19 budget is already “committed to certain projects that are in our Bylaws, our contracts, our operations, and other fixed costs.”

I might accept this sort of a response from a boring organization. An organization that got blindsided by a forecast that didn’t work out.

But I won’t accept this response from an interesting and important organization that has grown uncontrollably for the past decade. If you’re going to act like an important business and compete with exciting companies for talent, then you need to be willing to cut costs like any business does when things head south.

For example, ICANN has one of the most generous retirement plans I’ve ever seen. It contributes 5% of each employee’s salary to their 401(k) even if the employee doesn’t contribute a cent. They even match up to 10%. (When reviewing ICANN’s tax returns, I was surprised to see that not all highly-paid employees took the organization up on this match. It’s free money!)

This perk is apparently based on “competitive and regional practices”.

Perhaps I’ve been in the entrepreneurial world for too long, but can someone point me to other companies with retirement benefits like this? I think it’s time to go get a job there.

Marby needs to be prepared to make hard decisions. He gets paid close to $850,000 (if he hits his bonus) to make these decisions.

Consider suspending bonus programs or tie a significant portion of it to finding ways to be more efficient. Review facilities costs. Cut staff.

No one is indispensable. When it comes time to cut people, a lot of arguments are made that employee X or employee Y is too important to let go. They’re working on a project that’s too important or their domain knowledge is too important.

If an employee’s domain knowledge (here, figuratively and literally) is too important and will leave with them if they leave ICANN, then I’d argue that this employee hasn’t done a good job. A good employee will make sure to document his or her knowledge and bring others around them up to speed.

Oftentimes these employees that are “too important to be let go” end up leaving, and the organization moves along without missing them a few months later.

These aren’t fun things to do. And it’s not the fault of the individual employees that will be hurt by this. But it’s important if ICANN is to retain its role in the domain name system going forward.

And while the community should certainly be consulted, it’s up to the highly-paid management to make the tough calls.

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Do you call this cybersquatting?

A National Arbitration Forum panelist has found in favor of clothing company Guess in a dispute over the domain names guessandco.info, guessandco.org, guessandcoshareholder.info, theguessbreadcompany.com, theguessconstructioncompany.com, and theguessprivatemerchantcompany.com

Guess was recently found guilty of reverse domain name hijacking in a case filed with National Arbitration Forum, and I’d argue that the current case is also an abuse of the policy.

But panelist Ho Hyun Nahm found in favor of the clothing company instead.

The domain name owner didn’t respond, but the complainant handed over the evidence that should have been used to deny the case.

A man named Jerry Guess registered the domain names. Guess has a long history of having grand visions that don’t come to fruition. The FBI busted him and he served time for some of his activities.

While his businesses may have had more fluff than substance, he registered the domain names at issue to support his business operations and his company was named after him.

The clothing company Guess submitted an article to the panel about Jerry Guess’ former activities, which the panel used to ascertain “bad faith”:

…the Panel agrees that Respondent has previously engaged in bad faith behavior, and holds that Respondent registered and used the disputed domain names in bad faith.

So if someone engaged in bad behavior in business they should be assumed to have also registered domain names in bad faith? Domain names that include the person’s last name? Domain names that match proposed business ventures? Ventures that have nothing to do with clothing?

This isn’t cybersquatting. It’s not what UDRP was created for. I believe this was a poor decision.

I reached out to Jerry Guess and he said he is considering his options.

© DomainNameWire.com 2018. This is copyrighted content. Domain Name Wire full-text RSS feeds are made available for personal use only, and may not be published on any site without permission. If you see this message on a website, contact copyright (at) domainnamewire.com. Latest domain news at DNW.com: Domain Name Wire.

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A look at ICANN’s growing expenses.

So far I’ve reviewed ICANN’s swelling expenses at a high level as well as the massive headcount growth at the non-profit domain industry overseer. Now let’s dig a little deeper to look at the costs and how they are growing.

Here’s a chart showing the categorized expenses dating back to FY 2008:

This chart should say a thousand words.

There’s a slow and steady increase in expenses over time. Then there’s a huge bump in everything in 2013, surely due to new top level domains.

Professional services costs drop after the initial onslaught of new TLD work but continue to be 2x what they were before new TLD applications. Personnel and Administration continue their upward march even after the initial surge of new TLD work is done. Travel continues to be a major expense at $19 million last fiscal year.

In my next post I’ll summarize what I think has gone wrong and what should be done about it.

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Related posts:

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On this podcast we talk about visiting Panama for ICANN 62, DomainSherpa and the domain market.

This week we chat with Media Options CEO Andrew Rosener about three topics. First, we talk about his hometown of Panama City. ICANN is holding a meeting there this summer and Andrew explains what to expect when visiting the city. Then we discuss his acquisition of DomainSherpa and what he’s doing with the media platform. Finally, we discuss the domain name market so far in 2018. It’s off to a great start (for Media Options, at least). Also: Google surges into top registrars, Whois, Guess? did a bad thing, .AI domain changes, and .NYC.

Subscribe via iTunes to listen to the Domain Name Wire podcast on your iPhone or iPad, view on Google Play Music, or click play below or download to begin listening. (Listen to previous podcasts here.)

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Be careful when someone you don’t know emails you a great offer to buy their domain name.

Someone is sending emails to domain name owners telling them it’s their lucky day–they can acquire the domain name Luck.com for only $45,000.

According to the sender, he knows the domain is worth a lot more but he needs the funds fast. He posted a similar message on NamePros under a different name than he is emailing from.

Don’t fall for this too-good-to-be-true offer on a domain that sold for $675,000 in 2009.

It’s important to be especially careful when someone sends an unsolicited email to you offering a domain name for sale. Do your due diligence.

Unsolicited email solicitations are a popular way to offload stolen domains. Domain thieves try to sell these domains before people realize they are stolen and you can get stuck holding the bag.

Other times it’s not an issue of domain theft. It’s just an outright scam.

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Here’s what made waves in March.

March was a busy month in the domain name industry with people heading to CloudFest in Germany and the ICANN meeeting in Puerto Rico. On DNW, top stories involved Scientology, expired domains and a couple of big domain name sales.

These were the top stories on DNW last month:

1. Take a look at The Church of Scientology’s domain names – The controversial organization owns thousands of defensive domain names, plus some used to attack critics.

2. Another example of why your company must be the registrant of its domain names – A Canadian airline says that a contractor is holding its domain names hostage.

3. Name.com expired domains are now on GoDaddy – The registrar agreed to partner with GoDaddy for expired domains as part of its parent company’s deal to sell its domain portfolio to GoDaddy.

4. Star.org sells for $225,000 at Sedo – It is the third largest public .org sale of all time.

5. 17 end user domain name sales up to $500,000 – A three letter domain sold for a half of a million dollars. Does anyone want to buy DNW.com?

If you skipped any podcasts, here’s what you missed out on:

#178 (listen) – Learn how Bill Karamouzis is making money and growing businesses with domain names.
#177 (listen) – The challenges of new TLDs with United Domains CTO Tobias Sattler.
#176 (listen) – The owner of VPN.com explains the value of a category killer domain.
#175 (listen) – Understanding the market for corporate domain registrars with Elisa Cooper.

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Company backtracks on plans to redact Whois…for now.

Two days after informing registrars that it planned to redact almost all information from Whois records to comply with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Afilias has put its plans on hold.

The registry for domain names such as .info and .mobi issued a press release this evening saying that it hopes European data protection entities and ICANN will work out a model.

Afilias today announced that it is temporarily suspending plans to limit the display of WHOIS data to comply with the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) currently scheduled to take effect on 25MAY2018. Afilias has received a number of questions about its plans, and anticipates that they may be affected by guidance from data protection authorities that has been requested by ICANN. This guidance is expected to be materially helpful in the community’s efforts to resolve the various issues surrounding GDPR requirements.

Afilias is participating in a number of community groups that are considering these issues, including as a principal in ICANN’s pilot implementation of the Registration Data Access Protocol (RDAP), a potential technical solution for enabling differentiated access to registration data depending on the legitimate purpose of the requestor. For example, law enforcement may need access to certain types of Personally Identifiable Information (PII), trademark guardians to other types, etc. RDAP enables the management of this access in an efficient and effective manner.

However, if the parties don’t come to a resolution, Afilias might go forward with its plans in order to comply with the law and avoid big fines.

As the deadline for GDPR implementation approaches, the community is working diligently in a number of areas to find solutions needed to balance a wide range of community interests. Afilias will continue working collaboratively within these groups in the expectation that appropriate solutions will be reached prior to the GDPR implementation date. Absent guidance from the data protection authorities, Afilias will reconsider its plans as appropriate to ensure compliance with GDPR.

It’s possible that Afilias announced its plans for Whois as a way to galvanize parties into coming up with a solution before May 25. Judging by the response, it might have been effective.

© DomainNameWire.com 2018. This is copyrighted content. Domain Name Wire full-text RSS feeds are made available for personal use only, and may not be published on any site without permission. If you see this message on a website, contact copyright (at) domainnamewire.com. Latest domain news at DNW.com: Domain Name Wire.

Related posts:

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How much more valuable is Freedom.com than TheFreedom.com? 1000 times, apparently.

NameJet sold 102 domain names last month for $2,000 or more for a total of $500,000. Here are ten of the sales that jumped out at me:

Optimization.com $27,700 – A buyer might also want to pick up optimize.com and optimise.com, which are available for sale as a package.

Embarazo.com $11,111 – That’s Spanish for pregnancy.

GymEquipment.com $10,655 – This is a huge market although it goes by variations such as fitness equipment.

Painful.com $10,0001 – Pain terms are valuable, but I’m not sure what you’d do with this variation.

Paygrade.com $6,600 – A really nice domain for a salary data or job site.

Zilloow.com $3,656 – Unsurprisingly, the buyer is using Whois privacy.

Publicate.com $2,566 – The company that operates at Publicate.it is going to be upset that it missed this auction.

Cyclers.com $2,189 – A nifty name for a bicycling site.

BrandingStrategies.com $2,102 – The end user that eventually buys this will be in a good position to determine if it’s a good brand or not.

TheFreedom.com $2,000 – The buyer paid just 1/10 of one percent of the sale price of Freedom.com.

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Lack of contact details in public Whois could thwart inter-registrar domain transfers.

A few Domain Name Wire readers have asked how domain name transfers will work if domain registrars and registries eliminate contact details from Whois in response to the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

As it stands right now, domain name transfers could be a big problem.

The TechOps subcommittee of the Contracted Party House inside GNSO explained the difficulties — and possible solutions — to ICANN in a letter last month. The letter succinctly explains the problem:

Without question, domain name transfers will be significantly affected by GDPR, especially in light of ICANN’s recently proposed Interim Model for GDPR Compliance (Interim Model). The current ICANN transfer policy requires the gaining registrar to send a standardised form of authorisation (FOA) to the registrant or admin email address – that party is then required to take affirmative action and the involved registrars maintain a record of response. However, because the gaining registrar does not have the record of current registrant information at the time of transfer, it will typically pull it from the public WHOIS output (at the time of the transfer request, and prior to initiating a transfer request at the registry). The Interim Model does not make available the registrant’s email address through public WHOIS – leaving the gaining registrar unable to send the FOA through the usual means…

No public Whois, no easy way to get the current registrant’s information.

It’s worth noting that thick registries–those in which the registry maintains the contact details–could still grant access to registrars to get contact data. That assumes that the thick registries still maintain this data after GDPR, though.

The challenge would be biggest with thin registries–those in which only the registrar maintains the contact details. These include .com and .net.

One solution is for registrars to maintain whitelisted IP addresses for other registrars that will give them access to Whois records. But the letter points out that could take time to implement. GDPR kicks in May 25.

The subcommittee suggested a workaround until a long term fix can be instituted.

A short-term solution might seem like a blast from the past. The new registrar would initiate a transfer based on receiving the EPP/auth code from the registrant. The old registrar would then send an email to the registrant. If they don’t approve the transfer, the losing registrar could deny the transfer. (Currently, no response after five days is assumed as approval.)

The group also said that ICANN would need to revoke the change of registrant procedure for now. Registrars would verify the registrant for each completed inbound transfer.

Right now ICANN is pushing European data authorities to delay action as it relates to Whois. But registrars might not act universally. Denying access to Whois contact details would be a convenient way for a registrar to slow down outbound transfers.

© DomainNameWire.com 2018. This is copyrighted content. Domain Name Wire full-text RSS feeds are made available for personal use only, and may not be published on any site without permission. If you see this message on a website, contact copyright (at) domainnamewire.com. Latest domain news at DNW.com: Domain Name Wire.

Related posts:

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2. Will May 2018 be the death of Whois?
3. Domain investors risk being left out of Whois discussion

EPP automates many .AI transactions people take for granted with other domains.

Anguilla’s country code domain name .AI has become popular in recent years thanks to artificial intelligence companies. Now the domain has a bit of intelligence itself.

The domain name registry has moved to the Council of Country Code Administrators (CoCCA) platform, which means that many transactions that were previously manual can be achieved using Extensible Provisioning Protocol (EPP).

Previously, registrars had to perform transactions on a .AI web page. Many updates were handled manually by the registry, which is managed by one person on the tiny island of 15,000 people. Nameserver updates were performed once a day on weekdays, for example.

And if a hurricane hit the island, all bets were off.

Moving to CoCCA might also give the registry more resiliency in its DNS infrastructure.

As part of the move to CoCCA, individuals can no longer register domains directly through the registry. Since many registrars already offer domains on CoCCA, you can expect more to start offering .AI domain names for sale. One such registrar that recently added .AI is Hexonet (1api). A full list of supporting registrars is here.

Domain names can be transferred between registrars. However, there is a transfer fee equal to a new registration that does not add years to the registration. So it’s unlikely people will transfer registrars to get lower registration fees.

The wholesale cost of a .AI domain is $100 for two years.

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A restaurant delivery service, theater and tourism site operator bought domain names.

Sedo’s top sale this past week was Handle.com for €77,500. That sale appears to be the reverse of an end user sale. It was once owned by an end user but was purchased by a domain investor.

Here are 13 examples of domain names bought through Sedo over the past week that are in the hands of end users now:

(You can view previous lists like this here.)

HawaiianIslands.com $15,000 – The owner of vacation site SmokyMountains.com.

HuntClub.com $9,700 – Employee-finder site HuntClub.co bought the matching .com domain.

ProjectCentral.com $7,000 – The Whois has privacy but it’s definitely creating a project on the domain.

ProjectRise.com $5,000 – The domain name forwards to happiness-seekers.com, a site run by someone promoting the Church of Latter-Day Saints.

Front.fr €4,500 – Front is the “Shared Inbox for Teams”. It uses the domain name FrontApp.com.

WayConsulting.com $2,888 – Way group Qatar. For some reason, the registrant is in Canada.

Vevot.com $2,650 – The domain has Whois privacy but forwards to a page with information about Blockchain.

EyeSpace.com $2,500 – The buyer is creating an ecommerce store on EyeSpace.com.

PrimeSolutions.net $2,500 – This is a New Jersey IT company.

VIPNews.com $2,500 – vipnews, a part of illu NEWS Ltd.

China-i.com $2,200 – China-I helps companies with their international investments. It uses the matching China-i.org domain name.

Eat365.com $2,000 – Eat 365 is a food delivery service.

SaddlersWells.com $2,000 – Sadler’s Wells Theatre in London.

© DomainNameWire.com 2018. This is copyrighted content. Domain Name Wire full-text RSS feeds are made available for personal use only, and may not be published on any site without permission. If you see this message on a website, contact copyright (at) domainnamewire.com. Latest domain news at DNW.com: Domain Name Wire.

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2. What domain names Business Insider and 18 others bought last week
3. What domain names Mozilla and others bought last week

Brian Krebs digs into a zero-click network of mostly typo domains.

Last month Brian Krebs wrote about .cm domains and other typos on his site KrebsOnSecurity.com, building on research done by Matthew Chambers of SecureWorks.

The story reviewed a number of typo domain names and where they pointed. They all seemed to forward to other pages that sometimes led to malware. In other words, “zero-click” parking.

Krebs reviewed some of the domains that the typos forwarded to. He found that they were all registered with the email address ryanteraksxe1@yahoo.com*. Krebs entered that email address into the “forgot password” tool on Yahoo email and it revealed that the backup email address was k*****ng@mediabreakaway[dot]com.

Media Breakaway is Scott Richter’s company. It owns the domain parking service The Parking Place, which uses a combination of monetization techniques.

A reader on Kreb’s site noted that four years of access logs for the network of domain names were available for download on the hosting provider’s site. Krebs was able to download it and Chambers reviewed the data.

The data show that the network received about 12 million visits during the first quarter of 2018.

It’s possible some of these are for non-.cm domain names or on traffic funneled through those domains. Any way you look at it, though, it’s a lot of traffic.

* This type of research won’t be possible if Whois goes dark after GDPR.

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Company wanted G81.com domain name but the panelist says the clothing company tried to mislead it.

A National Arbitration Form panel has found clothing company Guess (NYSE:GES) to have engaged in reverse domain name hijacking over the domain name G81.com.

Guess filed a complaint arguing that the owner of the domain name was cybersquatting with the domain name. The owner of the domain name bought it, as well as many other three character domain names, as an investment. At the same time he acquired the domain he also acquired g83.com and g87.com.

The owner of G81.com said he had never heard of Guess’ G81 mark, which Guess says it has been using on its clothing since at least 2001. You can understand why the domain owner couldn’t find it; search for G81 on Google and you won’t find Guess on the first page. Amusingly, search for G81 on Guess.com and you’ll get this result:

The domain owner also called three Guess stores and the company’s national call center to inquire about the product and was told that they don’t carry a product by that name.

He asked the complainant to show him how the brand was being used and was stonewalled.

In finding reverse domain name hijacking, the panelist noted:

…from the outset, Respondent squarely put the question to Complainants, which the Panel now paraphrases as asking: “How can I have intentionally targeted your G81 branded products, when we can find no such products on the market? Tell us which of your products are offered under the G81 mark, which are said to have put us on notice of your rights in the Mark?” From that time forward, Complainants have, in the view of the Panel, “stone-walled” the Respondent, rebuffing this relevant and material question with the reply: “Complainants are neither required nor obligated to show how they use the G81 Mark”.

Respondent’s submissions have shown that despite repeated calls by Respondent for Complainants to specify and identify exactly what products and services Complainants offer in commerce in connection with the G81 Mark, which might have put Respondent on notice of Complainants’ Mark, Complainants have continuously failed and refused to do so, and have largely ignored and failed to so much as acknowledge Respondent’s focused inquiries.

In its Additional Submission, Complainants berate the Respondent as having “fixated on irrelevant issues”, and criticize what Complainants refer to as “Respondent[‘s] attempts to cloud the issues” and for “dedicating the majority of its response to irrelevant purported facts and arguments which have no bearing on the present UDRP proceeding.” Complainants conclude: “Respondent’s attempts to mislead the Panel should be disregarded, and the subject domain name should be transferred to Complainants.”

Panelist David L. Kreider found that it was actually Guess that tried to mislead the panel.

Guess tried to acquire the domain name in 2013. Negotiations broke off after the parties didn’t agree on a price. Five years later (and 14 years after the domain owner acquired the domain) Guess filed the cybersquatting complaint.

All of these factors contributed to the panelist finding that GUESS? filed the case in abuse of the policy and reverse domain name hijacking.

Update: a reader pointed out that Guess’ counsel, Gary J. Nelson of Christie, Parker & Hale, LLP, is also a WIPO panelist for UDRP and has heard 82 cases. In other words, a UDRP-accredited panelist was found to have brought a case in abuse of the policy.

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2. Things aren’t looking so good for Grandma Heidi Powell
3. Dreamlines GmbH is a reverse domain name hijacker

Afilias will stop showing contact info and ownership data on millions of domains including .info, .mobi and more.

Much of the focus of General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) as it relates to Whois has been on registrars. But many top level domains operate under a “thick Whois” system in which the registry maintains the personal data of registrants.

Today, registry Afilias informed registrars that it’s ditching almost all of the data in Whois. No contact data whatsoever; just a bit of technical data and the registrar’s data.

Here’s what Afilias Whois records will look like at the end of May:

As for law enforcement and trademark owners? Until models are worked out, they’re screwed.

(An Afilias spokesperson reiterated that it is committed to working with law enforcement to provide them the information they need. Please note the portion of the email titled “Law Enforcement”.)

Here’s the full text of the message Afilias sent to registrars today:

***
Dear Registrar,

As a follow-up to discussions at ICANN61, this provides an update of Afilias’ plans for addressing compliance with the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that will go into effect on 25 May 2018.

Effective 25 May 2018, Afilias will minimize the data displayed in the public WHOIS for Afilias-owned TLDs and will begin displaying ONLY operational technical data (not contact data). AFILIAS-SUPPORTED TLDS MAY OPT-IN TO THIS APPROACH (LIST NOT AVAILABLE YET).

A marked-up version of our current WHOIS output is shown on “Attachment 1” so you can see which data will continue to be displayed and which data will no longer be publicly displayed. Our Registry Operator clients may either adopt our solution or leave the WHOIS as is; we do not expect to provide tailored solutions.

Afilias “owned” TLDs affected by this are: .info, .mobi, .pro, .poker, .pink, .black, .red, .blue, .kim, .shiksha, .promo, .lgbt, .ski, .bio, .green, .lotto, .pet, .bet, .vote, .voto, .archi, .organic and .llc.

From a registry standpoint, we see no impact of this registry action on registrars. Registrars are free to continue transferring thick data to the registry, although you may elect to similarly truncate your own WHOIS display (that is up to individual registrars).

The approach above is supplemented by our perspectives on the following:

ICANN Compliance:
Our ICANN registry contracts require display of the full WHOIS, which is inconsistent with GDPR requirements. To avoid possible ICANN contract compliance issues, ICANN has suggested to Afilias that a “local law exemption” be sought. As an Irish company, Afilias plans to consult with the Irish DPA and local counsel on how to best address the application of local law (the GDPR) on WHOIS output.

Law Enforcement:
Afilias continues to constructively engage with law enforcement agencies (LEAs) and other Registration Authorities to explore potential mechanisms to ensure that LEAs are not unreasonable restricted in their access to WHOIS data.

Trademark/IP Interests:
As there is no “accreditation” mechanism yet for access to WHOIS by Trademark and IP interests, Afilias intends to eliminate access until a consensus emerges in this area.

ccTLDs:
Some of the ccTLDs Afilias supports may be affected by GDPR as well, especially if they have registrants or registrars in the EU. It is unclear to Afilias how DPAs will treat cases involving ccTLDs. ccTLD operators may or may not adopt the Afilias approach to WHOIS; they may contact you separately.

There are a host of other GDPR-related issues that remain unresolved (e.g. consent management, natural/legal person status, etc), and Afilias is actively engaged with the community.

Should consensus or other changes indicate adjustments to the above, we will advise you accordingly.

Please reach out to your Afilias contact if you have any questions.

© DomainNameWire.com 2018. This is copyrighted content. Domain Name Wire full-text RSS feeds are made available for personal use only, and may not be published on any site without permission. If you see this message on a website, contact copyright (at) domainnamewire.com. Latest domain news at DNW.com: Domain Name Wire.

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2. Verisign to .Web losers: stop griping and carry on
3. Domain investors risk being left out of Whois discussion

DNS can be applied to IoT, but it probably won’t boost second-level domain registrations.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has granted patent number 9,935,950 (pdf) to Verisign (NASDAQ: VRSN) for “Systems and methods for establishing ownership and delegation ownership of IOT devices using domain name system services”.

I have long searched for ways in which domain names can be used for connected devices, e.g. The Internet of Things. I have yet to find any good examples in which domain names are better than alternative technologies for accessing the devices. Nevertheless, there are certain aspects of the domain name system that could be applied to IoT.

Here’s the abstract to Verisign’s patent:

Provided is a method for establishing ownership of a component of an internet of things (“IoT”) device. The method comprises receiving, at a registration service, a request to register the component of the IoT device, the request comprising a public key of the component of the IoT device, an identifier of the component of the IoT device, and a public key of an owner of the component of the IoT device; determining a qualified name for the component of the IoT device based on a name associated with the owner of the component of the IoT device; generating one or more domain name system (“DNS”) records for the component of the IoT device, the one or more DNS records comprising an authentication file that identifies a chain of ownership of the component of the IoT device; and storing the one or more DNS records in a registry.

The patent includes one example of how domain names could be used:

For example, the IOT service 115 can establish a domain for IOT devices such as “.iotservice.com.” As the devices are registered with the IOT service 115, the IOT service assigns the domain name and creates the DNS records for the IOT devices. For example, if the IOT devices 105 are owned by “Company A,” the IOT service can create a domain “companyA.iotservice.com.” The IOT service 115 can assign a unique domain name to each of the IOT devices, for example, “iotdevice1.companyA.iotservice.com.” The domain and the domain names for each of the IOT devices allow consumers 140 to locate and communicate with the IOT devices 105.

Note that this example doesn’t include a new second-level domain registration for each device. That would be ill-advised for domain names that fall under ICANN’s regulations (cybersquatting, annual fees, etc.).

We have over 50 connected devices in our house. We access them with our voice, apps and routines/recipes, not domain names.

© DomainNameWire.com 2018. This is copyrighted content. Domain Name Wire full-text RSS feeds are made available for personal use only, and may not be published on any site without permission. If you see this message on a website, contact copyright (at) domainnamewire.com. Latest domain news at DNW.com: Domain Name Wire.

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2. VeriSign to Pay $6M More to ICANN in FY 2010
3. Verisign shares drop 15% on contract change

Jack Stratton filed a dispute to try to get the domain name Vulf.com on behalf of the record label.

Vulfpeck performing in NYC. Its label was found guilty of reverse domain name hijacking. Photo credit EvanLBerent / CC 2.0

A founding member of the funk group Vulfpeck has been found guilty of trying to reverse hijack a domain name in a cybersquatting dispute.

Jack Stratton filed the dispute with National Arbitration Forum on behalf of Vulf Records. He argued that the domain name Vulf.com was cybersquatting on its brand.

But the current owner of Vulf.com owned it well before ether Vulfpeck or the record label were formed, according to the decision.
The three-member panel noted that Vulf Records didn’t appear to be represented by counsel, which might explain why its filing was so bad. Still, the panel said that Stratton should have known the case was doomed to fail:

Even though Complainant appears to be self-represented, he should have recognized that a domain name registered years before the Complainant even claims to have begun using the mark could not possibly have been registered in a bad faith effort to exploit the Complainant’s mark.

© DomainNameWire.com 2018. This is copyrighted content. Domain Name Wire full-text RSS feeds are made available for personal use only, and may not be published on any site without permission. If you see this message on a website, contact copyright (at) domainnamewire.com. Latest domain news at DNW.com: Domain Name Wire.

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1. Master Call Connections is a domain name hijacker
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