Domains & DNS: April 2006 Archives

Frank Michlick, in his most recent article, explains the concept of "traffic testing" domains:

A list of domain names is registered for a period from 1-5 days and then deleted again if the amount of traffic (or income) has not reached a certain threshold. Some of the testers will display a ‘parked page’ with PPC advertising and some of them will just display an empty page during the testing period.

So which domains are they testing this with? Previously owned ones seems to be the answer. So if you let your domain get deleted and it has traffic, then you can kiss it goodbye .......

Eurid's ADR (Alternative Dispute Resolution) court is going to be kept busy in coming months. Its first decision in the case of pst.eu has already been published with the ADR adjudicator finding no fault in the initial registration. The basis for the decision is quite worrying:

. Taking into consideration the provisions of articles 10.1 and 10.2 of the Commission Regulation (EC) No. 874/2004 of 28th April 2004; article 12.3 of the same Regulation; article 14 of the same Regulation, according to the documentation filed with the Case File it is inferred that PST Business Solutions VV is owner of the trademark registered b the Benelux Trademarks Office “PST” nº 0779280, with publication date 01-01-2006; 2. Bearing in mind that although the Complainant has filed an opposition against the aforementioned trademark, according to the documentation filed by EURid such an opposition has finalized, without any statement that the trademark has been rejected; 4. Bearing in mind that PST Business Solutions has applied for the domain name on December 7, 2006 at 11:01:21.274 h. and Peripheral Systems Technology B.V. has applied for it on December 7, 2006 at 1:07:59.072 hr.; 4. Bearing in mind that the Registry shall register the domain name on the first come, first served basis, as per article 14 of the Commission Regulation (EC) No. 874/2004; 5. Bearing in mind that it is not realized that the Decision made by the Registry conflicts with the European Union Regulations (ADR Rules B (1) 11. d. (1) 2.), I decide to reject the claim and confirm the decision made by the Registry.

IEDR unlike Nominet does not have a democratic structure, nor does it have committees or other organisms to oversee rules, regulations and many other aspects of the registry's development. Who is even on the board of the IEDR? Who chooses the board members? While personally I think this should all be addressed I have to admit that some areas of the registry's activities are cause for more concern than others. While the rules and regulations have developed over time they are still sorely inadequate for the Ireland we now live in. As things stand the IEDR is lumbered with a number of rules that while aimed at protecting the national domain name space are actually doing more to hinder its development. A case in point is the personal name rule. While there are ways and means to circumvent this restriction the question begging to be asked is why the restriction exists in the first place. The other one that springs to mind is that of "indecent" or "offensive" domains. On the plus side IEDR management can smirk (or possibly gloat) at the chaos in Eurid.

One of the few things that Eurid seem to have done properly is providing a DAS server to supplement whois lookups. While a whois query on a .eu domain will return none too verbose results the das query is simplistic:

whois -h das.eu:4343 get 1.0 mneylon % .eu Domain Availability Server 1.0 % % (c) 2005 (http://www.eurid.eu) % %% RC = 0 Domain: mneylon Status: REGISTERED

No extra legal junk or dns etc., Simple results.

If you are interested in talking about domain names then maybe the new TalkDomains.eu site may be of interest :) A lot of the existing domain discussion forums have a US focus, while this forum will hopefully cater more to the European market. As always feedback is welcome

ICANN are looking for people to fill a number of roles:

* Three members of the ICANN Board of Directors * One member of the Council of the Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO) * One member of the Council of the Country-Code Names Supporting Organization (ccNSO) * Two members of the At Large Advisory Committee (ALAC)

Further details on the ICANN site

So how many .eu domains are being squatted by Irish cybersquatters? While the nationality of a cybersquatter normally wouldn't be of that much interest, the .eu cybersquatters seem to be following some interesting patterns. The only thing is that many of them do not seem to realise how much trouble they are going to cause themselves.

Bob Parsons, CEO of Godaddy, has posted again about the .EU sunrise fiasco with an analysis of the "phantom registrars" It seems that my suspicions about Delaware LLCs were well founded.. So, the question now is will someone do anything about this? Is it acceptable that london.eu and dublin.eu are ceded to opportunistic cybersquatters? Will the EU take action or will our politicians ignore the farce? As John points out, this is unlikely. Marc van Wesemael, the head of Eurid gave an interesting interview a few months ago. Some quotes:

Notre modèle économique est calculé sur la base d'un million de noms de domaine.

So that's been dealt with already...

Eurid est une association à but non lucratif.

Really? So the 3 or 4 hundred extra registrars you signed up recently didn't help your finances? 400 x 10000 euro = a LOT of money And what are they doing with the money?

Nous devons encore financer de lourds investissements, en serveurs notamment.

Maybe that got overlooked before Friday? And what about cybersquatting?

Avez-vous déjà remarqué des cas de cyberquatting ? Tout dépend ce que vous appelez cybersquatting. Si quelqu'un a déposé une marque imitant celle d'une enseigne connue, mais avec une différence orthographique, et que cette demande a été acceptée par les instances compétentes, nous ne pouvons nous opposer à l'enregistrement de son nom de domaine

. The man should go into politics!

No matter who you ask the number of speculative registrations during both sunrise and landrush for .eu was obviously high. Eurid has stuck its head in the sand and is claiming that the trademark laws were at fault not them. No matter what went on in the lead up to landrush one thing is sure - the domain aftermarket is booming. Sedo, which is one of the largest domain brokers, has over 36 thousand EU domains listed. While some of them are not legitimate listings (ie. none of the pending applications has been accepted by Eurid) that is still a high number so short after the landrush. So are all these registrations likely to stick? This could be a moot point, as the .es registry was forced to rollback a large number that were snapped up on opening and that was a ccTLD not a regional TLD. It's pity that the ADR site doesn't have an RSS feed .............

EU landrush is a fiasco. Why? Eurid and the EU dropped the ball completely. While you may have been lucky enough to get the domains you wanted under landrush (or one of the sunrises) a lot of people are going to be very upset due to the tactics employed by several hundred registrars who abused the system to their own end. The courts are going to be kept busy for the next couple of years sorting out the squatters from the legitimate registrants. Unlike other registries Eurid is governed by the EU, so in theory at least it should be less susceptible to abuse and under EC reg. 874/2004 cybersquatting / bad faith registrations are not allowed:

1. A registered domain name shall be subject to revocation, using an appropriate extra-judicial or judicial procedure, where that name is identical or confusingly similar to a name in respect of which a right is recognised or established by national and/or Community law, such as the rights mentioned in Article 10(1), and where it: (a) has been registered by its holder without rights or legitimate interest in the name; or (b) has been registered or is being used in bad faith.

Of course this is theory. Fact is another matter entirely and a cursory glance at some of the domains registered since Friday morning would reveal some very telling signs of abuse. Add to that the number of .eu domains already up for sale on aftermarket sites and the outlook is very bleak indeed More coverage on jmmc's blog and a nice explanation of how the system works over on Bob Parson's (just ignore the jingoism)

The EU registry opens to the public today at 11am CET Whether .eu will take off or become another .info or .biz is hard to say at this juncture, but there should be plenty of "fun and games" over the next few weeks as the ADR procedures take place

I've been following the marketing antics of some of our industry competitors closely. Some marketing ploys are quite interesting and in some cases even innovative, however there are some techniques that I find almost laughable A particular competitor seems to be having serious issues with their maths or maybe their comprehension of the English language.. To be honest, I'm not 100% sure. According to this particular company they have X thousand clients, however any statistics that I have seen would show that they do not have anything close to that number of clients, while they may host DNS for that number of domains. So why are they inflating their figures?