Why Did Pool Dropped C&R?

It all begins with ICANN. In October 2007, the ICANN GNSO Council launched a policy development process (PDP) on domain tasting. They produced an Initial Report for public comment that outlined the possible actions to be taken, and the arguments for and against such actions. Public comments were incorporated into a draft Final Report (posted 8 February) for GNSO Council review and action.

The GNSO Council approved a motion which effectively changes the AGP – where domains can be returned within five days without cost. The motion, which is pending for Board action, would prohibit any gTLD operator that has implemented an “add grace period” (AGP) from offering a refund to a registrar for any domain name deleted during the AGP that exceeds 10% of its net new registrations during that month, or fifty domain names, whichever is greater.

What Does Pool.com Think About This?

In an exclusive interview with DomainerIncome.com, Richard Schreier, CEO of Pool.com said the “decision to allow the $0.25 fee is a prudent business decision” and that “domain tasting will be far more selective and the economics of doing tasting
will change.”

So – what’s my take on this?

On the GNSO Council report; like anything masked under the guise of “security” these days, nobody is prepared to stand up and question it.

It’s obvious to me that ICANN has too many want-to-be, jet setting politicians and anti-business Internet purists who can’t stand “their Internet” being used to make money. That is, unless its for big American companies like Verisign.

Unfortunately, the Domain Name Industry is too fragmented and doesn’t have the funds in one single entity to hire a fleet of lobbyists and PR consultants to educate the market about such changes.

Earlier today, Vocaltec announced a sale to Karo Millennium J.P., L.L.C for $12 Million. That sale includes 11 Patents relating to Internet telephony as well as a domain name. As Vocaltec own a number of domain names, what has yet to be clarified is if internetphone.com is in, or out. My personal view, is that I’d pull it out and sell it at auction. The patents to be sold consist of nine US patents, one Israel patent and one Australian patent.

For those that don’t know, Vocaltec was a pioneer in the VOIP space in the early 90’s. Around 1995 I was using Vocaltec’s Internet Phone (with a headset connected up to my Soundblaster). It was crude, but it worked over my lightning fast 28.8k modem. How times have changed since then….

Three years ago they filed for the skunkworks trademark in Australia and Lockheed Martin objected.

Of course, Skunk Works is a term that was first coined in 1943 by Lockheed, currently trademarked by Lockheed Martin and widely used in business, engineering, and technical fields to describe a group within an organization given a high degree of autonomy and unhampered by bureaucracy, tasked with working on advanced or secret projects.

Their pair, without any assistance from lawyers, fought Lockheed Martin by themselves and won! Lou Schillaci told SmartCompany “We have put a lot of time into building the brand – our IP is so quirky that people remember it and that is the whole point. We look at web stats and the just 1% of people who used to come to our site by the word ‘skunkworks’ is up to 17% now, so that tells us people remember it and that is worth money to us.”

In case there was any doubt, Schillaci’s company, Skunkworks Pacific comes up #1 in Google for the term skunkworks.

The first round ends on Friday May 30, 2008 at 1:00 pm EDT, so go over there now if you want to take a look.  At this point in the auction process there are approximately 80 domains which include names such as:

• CV.ca
• Diploma.ca
• Fling.ca
• Income.ca
• Pharmacies.ca
• FloorTiles.ca
• Eyeglasses.ca

Just yesterday, AccountingJobs.ca received the highest bid of $599, meeting its reserve price. Check out the .CA Auction Blog for more details.

In Feb, the man allegedly called the website manager for the Lotus Steel Sheet Company (LSSC), and told them that he had their domain name for sale at $2,500. The company had a different domain name and subsequently didn’t pay the money.

In early May, Hieu allegedly posted damaging information on a fake website he had created and asked for VND50 million ($3,090). The company agreed to the deal and secretly contacted police.

Of course, that doesn’t protect existing .ca domain name holders, as their whois information could be anywhere! However, its been reported that changes made to whois data after June 10, won’t be publicly available.

Is the start of the end for the good old whois database? What will the police do to track down Internet criminals and phishing websites? Will other countries follow in Canadas footsteps? Is CIRA leaning too far towards the privacy advocates? Will the additional privacy attract criminals wanting to hide their identity?

The judge issued a temporary restraining order against the “unknown entity”, Atlanta Sports & Entertainment Marketing.

Court documents reveal various allegations, including that Mayweather objects to his name and likeness being used in conjunction with boxing and related services.

It’s been reported that the site allegedly costs $50 to sign up to a membership, where you can view video and other footage of the boxer.

While the website is still online, the content is no longer available – “404 Not Found”. It looks like Mayweather has won round one!

Some of the domain names include: lasvegastowers.com, lasvegastower.com, share-holder.com, comision.com, vegasi.com, and reporttv.com.

Escovar explains “In the game Monopoly, the person with the most properties usually wins. In this virtual age, whoever owns a list of highly valued and trafficked domain names owns the internet”.

The auction will go live on eBay on June 3, 2008 with a portion of proceeds going to the Make-A-Wish Foundation.

Two implementations of the algorithm, have been published on the NIST website, titled “Compute Visual Similarity of Top-Level Domains”. The first implementation can compare a string to proposed TLDs. For example, .pro has a 38% similarity to .prof.

The second implementation can compare two strings to each other. For example, .com and .cm have a 22% similarity to each other.

It will very interesting to see how this evolves over the coming years, especially with the possibility of different languages being introduced.

Vocalist Kevin Hanick told Press-Citizen, the letter read:

“We believe that your use of the name Lazy Boy and the Recliners and use and registration of the domain name lazyboyandtherecliners.com constitute trademark infringement and federal unfair competition in violation of the Lanham Act and at common law and may constitute dilution under the federal Trademark Dilution Revision Act.”

Rather than fight the issue, the band decided to change its name to The Reclinders and negotiated a donation of $2,500 the nonprofit organization, Summer of the Arts. The organization oversees many free events including the Friday Night Concert Series, Iowa Arts Festival and Iowa City Jazz Festival.