After DotAsia announced the results of its collision auction for the recent Sunrise Period, I was wondering in my last post why some valuable trademarked names had been auctioned for a pittance, and an anonymous commenter supplied the reason: the contestants are making the deals between themselves, and paying the registry nothing. That [...]

Registries and registrars have been touting auctions as the fairest way to distribute names where there are multiple parties and no clear rights that favor one party over another. The fact that they have a fair amount of self-interest in promoting this solution doesn’t mean it’s the wrong one. Auctions may be the [...]

One of the intelligent voices in domain names, Bret Fausett, has launched Name Brief, a new blog about, yes, domains.
Bret already has a great blog, Lextext, but this new venture is a different beast. Everything about Lextext asserts its not-for-profitness; everything about Name Brief lets you know that it’s a money-making [...]

North American Professional sports teams, that is. A nice list compiled by Wise Geek.
Tags: domain names, sports teams, sports domain names, sport domain names

There are only two undelegated top-level country-code domains, aside from those darkened by colonial diktat. One of them, .KP, the TLD of North Korea, is in the tender grip of the Dear Leader — enough said.
Western Sahara (.EH) is another matter. The nearest thing they have to a paranoid strongman who hates the [...]

Here’s the sale of stocktrades.com from the recent T.R.A.F.F.I.C. conference in New York. If you’d paid $1500, you could have seen this too.
$25,000 in case you were wondering.

Tags: domain auction, T.R.A.F.F.I.C.

Have you been drinking government Kool-Aid recently? Do you believe the nonsense emanating from ICANN Board Members about how allowing .XXX would get them involved in regulating content (as if rejecting the application were not exactly that)? Do you think ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee (whose website uses an IP address instead [...]

Why does Bob Parsons, CEO of GoDaddy, consistently win in the domain game? It’s not his diamond earring, or the bodyguards, or the right-wing politics, or even his “failed” superbowl commercials.
Here’s why:

ICANN has pulled the RegisterFly accreditation after that company’s total meltdown, leaving thousands of customers desperately searching for someone to give their [...]

Michael and Roger Collins of Afternic are very pleased — for now at least.
NameMedia (a.k.a. BuyDomains), a company which owns and sells hundreds of thousands of domain names, has purchased Afternic, a site where individuals can buy and sell domain names.
Small companies with good offerings will continue to be gobbled up as those with money [...]

Paul Twomey, ICANN’s default CEO, warns about the imminent collapse of the Internet.

“The internet is like a fifteen story building, and with international domain names what we’re trying to do is change the bricks in the basement,” he said.
“If we change the bricks there’s all these layers of code above the DNS … we have [...]