Name.com just had a promotion where $.50 from every .ORG registered until 12/31/08 was donated to Kiva.org.  On top of that, they were selling .orgs for a crazy $6.49 - which means you should buy them anyway. In case you didn’t know, Kiva lends money to entrepreneurs in the developing world, empowering them to lift themselves out of poverty. It’s the “teach the man to fish” approach using micro-transactions.

Earlier today I came across another headline - Verizon Wins $33 Million in Suit Over Domain Names. Apparently, “the default judgment of $50,000 for each of 663 addresses registered by the Internet company, OnlineNic, was issued last Friday by United States District Judge Jeremy D. Fogel in San Jose, Calif. Judge Fogel froze OnlineNic’s assets and ordered the transfer to Verizon of all identical or confusingly similar addresses. Verizon sought as much as $66.3 million in damages over names that included myverizonwireless.com, iphoneverizonplans.com and verizon-cellular.com.”

So, it got me thinking. What about donating a large chunk of that to charity? Of course I don’t know how much of the $33M will go in legal expenses. The point is (assuming they get the money) that Verizon have scored $33M. What about doing something good with a % of that?

Apparently the First Minister Alex Salmond visited the Spanish region of Catalonia and found this thing called the Internet. It turns out that Catalonia has .cat and so he wants .sco - just don’t tell him about SCO Unix. By the way - pussy.cat is taken.

“It is not only for Scots who live in Scotland but for our extensive Diaspora and it will be particularly appropriate for a bid to be made during the 2009 Year of Homecoming” Salmond said. I’m wondering if that means that all the Scots are leaving us to go home now its the new year?

It might come as no surprise that there is strong support for dot scot; according to the UK Press Association “Two government surveys showed support among Scots organisations running at 58% and in an international poll, the figure rose to 82%”. Scotland’s governing party, the SNP has got together a working group and is preparing for the submission to ICANN (assuming .anything-goes).

Word also has it that Groundskeeper Willie wants bigwillie.scot. So what do you think? Should Scotland have it’s own TLD or be made to share with those lovely English folk for a little while longer?

Just fill in the nomination form (totally  anonymous, no need to optin, etc).

• Netfleet reports that it has 7,500 quality domain names and has sold more than $40k of domains in the few months its been operational. That’s quite good for a new site - especially in the .au space.

• Netregistry has a customer base of 250,000 businesses. Its privately owned and has 80 full-time staff including developers, engineers, service and support specialists.

CEO of Netregistry, Larry Bloch made an interesting comment that resonated with me - “most people do not even realise that domain names are now tradeable assets so it’s a question of creating the industry as well as satisfying the demand.”

The other comment that reflected both the infancy of the industry and the opportunity, was made by David Lye, GM at NetFleet “its not enough to have hundreds of thousands of listings, but we also need to have a steady stream of transactions which will in turn help the market find a footing.” Its good to see some real business logic being applied to the domaining industry.

If you haven’t checked out the Netfleet marketplace, go over and take a look.

According to whois, Nordu.Net was registered on Jan 1, 1985. Don’t believe it? Well…as a nice little Christmas present, I’ve included a PDF version of a hardcover book titled The History of Nordu.Net. Consider it bedtime reading for Internet / networking geeks.

I’d also note another interesting bit of information. RFC 921 states on 15 Jan 85 under “Begin New Domain Registration” -”New domains may register according to the procedures and restrictions described in RFC-920 [5].” Perhaps they didn’t ask the Europeans?

This is how the list should look - the top 5 currently registered, oldest domain names are:

1. Nordu.Net - Jan 1, 1985

2. Symbolics.com - March 15, 1985

3. BBN.com - April 24, 1985

4. Think.com - May 24, 1985

5. MCC.com - July 11, 1985

If you know of any older domain names please let me know and I will update the list.

united-domains AG was valued at 34 million euro and will be sold (subject to due diligence on the financial statements) to United Internet. The transaction is looking to close in Q1 2009.

Thoughts

When your share price is 0.15 € and you have a big picture of a dog as your logo, now might be the time to sell the house and think about doing something else.

It also goes on to say that “ICANN needs to ensure that the plan would not jeopardize the stability and security of the Internet addressing system.”

Finally, we have someone in the Commerce Department who can see this obvious fundamental problems with what ICANN is proposing. Lets hope this letter is the precursor to stopping this really stupid idea. Keep up the good work Meredith.

More information: USA Today, San Francisco Chronicle, Arizona Daily Star, The Salt Lake Tribune, Las Vegas Sun.

Here is an extract from the new ICANN Policy:

“During any given month, an Operator shall not offer any refund to an ICANN-accredited registrar (hereinafter referred to as “Registrar”) for any domain names deleted during the AGP that exceed (i) 10% of that Registrar’s net new registrations (calculated as the total number of net adds of one-year through ten-year registrations as defined in the monthly reporting requirement of Operator Agreements) in that month, or (ii) fifty (50) domain names, whichever is greater, unless an exemption has been granted by an Operator.”

In an email to me yesterday, Dynadot stated “Due to this change, we may have to raise grace deletion fees substantially or remove grace deletions altogether.” This really means “We don’t know what we are going to do yet”. It will be interesting to see what some of the larger registrars do, in particular Moniker. Lets wait and see.

Here are some WIPO stats:

• The number of cases administered by WIPO under UDRP procedure - 14,000+
• Parties have been located in 144 countries
• Internet domain names - 25,000+

Perhaps the WIPO workload is increasing?