Entries tagged with “domainers” from Domains / Internet Technology News - DNS News

I really am a sucker for silly junk, but the idea of getting a Rick Schwartz bobblehead was incredibly appealing, so I did ...



They were auctioning a signed one off on Ebay, however they weren't shipping it outside the US, so I didn't bid (well I did bid, I just didn't get carried away!)

John Battelle is one of the keynote speakers at DomainFest this year.

In the most recent post to his blog he's been asking a few interesting questions about the domain industry. They're probably the most obvious questions someone could ask, but that doesn't make it any easier to actually answer them accurately:

A few things I'd love to know with some authority:

- Overall size of the market

- What percentage of traffic is "type in"?
- How do majors figure in the business - do they endorse, ignore, partner (I know Google partners...)
- How much of the domaining business revenue is Google Adsense?

A lot of that information is closely guarded, a fact that people like Michael Gilmour are not slow top point out when questioning the transparency of the parking companies.

Nominet has published a very detailed and comprehensive position paper on "front running". Although the paper is a mere 5 pages long it covers all the areas that the topic encompasses very well and is well worth a read.

The topic of "front running" has received some publicity in the last few months. If you're not familiar with the concept Nominet's definition is helpful:

Domain Name Front Running (DNFR) is a technique believed to exist, but so far unproved, whereby one person monitors the activity of a second person who is planning to register a domain name and the first person then registers the domain name before the second person.

While nobody can deny that there maybe a certain amount of "front running" it probably doesn't warrant as much attention as people are currently giving it. During one of the SSAC's sessions at the recent ICANN meeting in Los Angeles the topic was touched on briefly, but nobody has been able to provide any tangible evidence of it actually occurring.
As someone who works in the internet business I've been contacted several times by clients who felt that they were victims of DNFR. Unfortunately for the clients none of the cases were genuine, as the names could easily have been chosen by someone else for perfectly legitimate reasons.
One of the things that isn't mentioned in the Nominet paper, however, is whois caching. As Nominet is a registry it's understandable that they may have overlooked this issue. In essence what happens is that larger registrars don't use whois lookups to check availability, as whois is far too slow. It might work fine for Joe Soap who only sends a few queries to the servers per day, but when you are generating thousands of queries per hour you want and need ultra-fast responses. Rather than rely on the mechanisms underlying whois many registrars use other methods, such as polling copies of zonefiles etc., to check domain availability. The result being that it is possible that a domain may appear to be available after it has been registered. Of course the time differences we're talking about can be minutes or even seconds, but the average registrant probably isn't aware of this.
In any case I hope that the SSAC and other organisations don't waste too many resources on this sort of investigation. While it may have its merits there are other matters that are of much greater importance to both registrars and registrants that should be addressed and any time spent on secondary and less important matters is a distraction.  

There will be a one day domain congress in Madrid next month organised by the people behind ForumDominios.com

The day's lineup looks quite interesting and covers topics such as the Spanish domain market, monetisation strategies, legal issues, dotmobi, the future of the .es namespace and other topics.

Full details and registration is on their site (in Spanish)

Domain pricing is always an emotive subject.

In recent discussions among Nominet members it came up as part of a discussion on drop-catching and domaining. Some people feel that the fees are too high, while others feel that they need to be increased significantly in order to discourage domainers.
 Within the Irish internet community the upcoming change to policy regarding "personal domain names" has led to some discussion on how registrars set their pricing.

While at an ICANN level there's been a lot of mixed messages flying about.

For anyone interested in domains at any level it can all get a bit confusing.

So what exactly is going on?

ICANN announced a drop in their fees a few months ago. Several of the larger ICANN registrars passed on the savings directly to their clients, with some of them even refunding people.
Of course registrars can be a fickle bunch, so you may not always get the full picture.
Do the registrars pass on savings to their clients all the time?
In short - no.
Do registrars pass on costs to their client?
A lot of the time - yes.

So what costs are affecting registrars?
Both Verisign and Afflilias are upping their fees as of October 15

And some of the registrars will have to pass on those increases to their clients since their pricing has always been set with such a narrow margin.

Enom, for example, has already announced a 50 cent increase for all their resellers for com / net / org / info / biz / name and .us.

But what about .mobi?

From what I have been able to gather a lot of the registrars have been treating .mobi as some sort of "premium" domain name since its launch last year.

What does that mean?

Basically we've all been charged extra for the "honour" of registering the domains.

DotMobi domains are not manually checked, as is the case with say .ie domains, so there's no reason for charging a premium on them unless you want to do so as a marketing ploy.

Dotmobi, it transpires, are currently offering registrars promotional pricing on .mobi domains, but a lot of registrants will never see the full benefit of the pricing promotion as the registrars will be pocketing  the profit.

If  your registrar isn't offering any discount at present on dotmobi domains, then maybe you should ask them why....