May 2008 Archives

Nominet has been working on developing and improving their "online services" over the past year.

The "online services" are available to both registrants and registrars and allow both user types to manage various aspects of their interactions with the UK registry.

Next month the registry plans to take the domain transfers / trades online.

The announcement may be found on their site here

Unfortunately details on how this is going to be implemented haven't been supplied as yet, but based on past experiences it could be another case of "all or nothing" with the offline form based solution being removed entirely, which leads to a new set of issues for registrants and their agents.

We'll have to wait and see.

I keep a close eye on the WIPO UDRP decisions, as sometimes they can be very interesting.

In most cases decisions are either upheld or denied and when they are upheld the normal followup would be for the domain in question to be transferred to the IP holder.

However WIPO's latest set of UDRP decisions shows a different line of thought entirely.

In several cases involving pharmaceutical products the panel has decided in favour of cancelling the domains.

But what is to stop someone from simply re-registering them again? Couldn't I or anyone else just grab the domains as soon as they became available for registration.

Maybe I'm missing some finer detail that only an "inner circle" is privy to.

Eurid is expanding its technical infrastructure this weekend.

According to notifications sent to Eurid registrars they are expanding into a new data centre space.

Unfortunately the knock-on effect is that the registry backend will not be available to registrars for up to six hours on Saturday.

Sedo, which is one of the most popular domain markets, is running a number of "premium" domain auctions in the coming weeks.

Some of the domains that are scheduled to come under the hammer include america.com, import.com and cognac.com. While cognac.com is unlikely to get the same level of interest or fetch as high a price as vodka.com, which sold for $3 million, it is likely to net a very healthy price.

Of course if you're going to be bidding on domains in that price bracket some level of vetting is to be expected. Sedo have three levels of buyer certification and depending on the level your access to higher value auctions may be restricted.

It's worthwhile getting basic certification well in advance, as you don't want to discover too late that your account is restricted (as happened to me!)

Stephane's latest post talks about an attempt to use a mathematical algorithm to help decide on which TLDs to allow in the future.

The algorithm, which you can read more about here, works on the basis of comparing "strings" to see if they are confusing. It draws in part on the Levenshtein distance

It will be interesting to see how ICANN make use of this tool in the months ahead, but as Black points out, it only deals with visual similarities:

Note that the algorithm is not meant to consider phonetic similarity. For example, "fish", "phish", and "fiche" sound alike, but are visually distinct and unlikely to be confused.

The IE Domain Registry has announced in the last few days that they are now doing rebuilds and reloads 7 days a week and that the frequency has been increased from twice a day to four times a day