Network Solutions has been served with a class action suit. The suit claims that the NSI has forced customers into buying domains from the company rather than through potentially cheaper avenues, in effect netting the company millions of dollars. This make me happy, since I’ve always viewed NSI/Verisign as a government-sponsored monopoly that gets away with murder. Recently they were busted (in the colloquial “you got caught on tape” sense) for domain front-running. This is the practice of reserving domains that had been searched for availability at the NSI site: You’d type in some domain name, it would come up as available, and then (unbeknownst to you) NSI would register it. If you then tried to register it anywhere but at NSI, it would be listed as unavailable. They claimed that they were doing this to protect their “customers” from becoming victims of front-running by other registrars…yeah, and if you believe that, I have some very nice lakefront property in Florida for ya.

So now they’re being sued for this. I’m very curious to see how the suit plays out, as they have a long history of abusing and overcharging their customers (I’ll have a rant about that in an upcoming blog entry). They seem to have been caught red-handed here. On the other (red) hand, they’re the 500 lb gorilla that no one seems to be able to subdue. We’ll just have to wait and see.

Domain name availability is a huge issue for us as a naming firm. I can’t tell you how many great company names have been struck from lists merely because the domain is not available - or worse, how many times clients’ hearts have been broken because a domain acquisition deal fell through. I’m pretty good at brokering domain deals, but even I can’t strongarm those domain barons in the Cayman Islands, who populate the Interwebs with clickthrough sites.

John Zuccarini is something of legend in cybersquatting history. And now he’s in the news again:

The Federal Trade Commission has fined a “typosquatter” who served adult advertisements on misspelled domains such as BobtheBiulder.com and Teltubbies.com a second time — this time for advertising mainstream products instead of adult.

John Zuccarini has agreed to give up $164,000 in revenue from typosquatting, registering domains that are misspellings of legitimate brands, he is alleged to have received, the FTC said Tuesday.

He was in the news quite a lot in the Old Days(tm), when he was snapping up domains and redirecting them to porn sites, and getting sued right, left, and center. Then he disappeared for a while. Apparently it was too difficult to run his business effectively while in prison for typosquatting and child pornography charges. (Typosquatting is illegal, did you know that?)

But you know, $164k is a drop in the bucket to him:

Although Zuccarini forfeited $164,000 in his recent settlement, in the 2003 criminal complaint the U.S. Justice Department said that he had been making as much as $1 million per year from his adult-oriented activities.

It raises some interesting questions of whether there should be “public spaces” on the internet that no one can own, and the ethics of registering domains merely to collect money from ad clickthroughs.
Once upon a time, Catchword had registered zuccarini.info. But I think we let it lapse. I wonder if it’s still available…we could put up some clickthrough ads…

No, not really, but Wired is using this pic for their story and I liked it.

A Nevada man pleaded guilty Thursday to his plotting to steal domain names URLs from their legitimate owners by impersonating a California intellectual property lawyer and send threatening letters to domain name owners in hopes of convincing them to turn over the domains to him.
Las Vegas resident David Scali registered the email address trademarkinfringement@netzero.net in 2006 and then, pretending to be a real Califonia lawyer (whose intials are K.Y.C.), threatened domain name owners with $100,000 trademark infringement suits, unless they transferred the domains within 48 hours.

He only hooked one domain owner, fortunately. The lesson, as always, is to beware of email that demands you do something with your domains NOW!, whether it’s turning them over to someone else, renewing with a different registrar, or listing them in a directory. And be especially careful when the email comes from someone with a Netzero email address. Bozo.

Did anyone else catch Stuart Elliott’s piece in yesterday’s NYT on TIAA-CREF promoting their .org status as a differentiator? I guess now that saying “.com” is assumed, those people with something else to say might as well try to capture the moment. We naming consultants were not so impressed.

They overlooked the fact that .org is not strictly regulated to include only not-for-profit companies. Unlike the .edu suffix, which is carefully monitored to ensure that only secondary, accredited schools can register domains using the suffix, .org is open to anyone. In fact, many companies register the .com AND the .org (including TIAA-CREF) whether they are for-profit or not, merely as a defense against someone else registering the domain for some other use.

I think it would be a great step forward for the powers that be to consider limiting .org registrations to non-profits (the same way the .edu domain names are regulated). TIAA-CREF’s strategy would be more defensible, and more radical, in that context. And the rest of the non-profit community would find name development much easier.

Business 2.0 ran a great article in their most recent issue about dot-com moguls. They may call themselves “moguls,” but those of us in the naming industry just call them a royal pain in the butt.

These guys buy up and squat on hundreds of thousands of valuable domain names. Usually they have no interest in selling any of the domains in their portfolio. This becomes a sticky situation when trying to come up with company names for clients that require the exact dot-com URL. We have bumped into the Frank Schilling’s Cayman Islands company a few times in the past. We quickly learned that his domains are not for sale, and not to recommend any name for which he owns the URL.

In some ways you kind of respect these folks for having the insight to buy up domains and turn their portfolios into a lucrative business model. Most of the time though, you just feel helplessly annoyed that you can’t have the perfect domain for your perfect name.

Click here for a pdf of the article.

“Every day, companies lose their domain names by accident because they failed to renew. Protect your valuable online identity for 100 years and rest assured that it will be automatically renewed into the next century.”

100 year domain registration? Really?

This is a new service from Network Solutions, your government-approved monopolistic domain registrar. It’s only $9.99 a year for 100 years = $999 total. “This is a savings of over 70% compared to paying annually”, it says. Before signing up for such a contract, I would consider whether the economy, the Internet, the United States, the planet Earth, and any life in this solar system will still be around in 100 years.

Or you could just go to GoDaddy and pay $8.95 a year.