Domain Names And The US Election

Obama has change.gov and McCain has RepublicanForAReason.com. Many Internet marketers are commenting that RepublicanForAReason.com is too long and hard to type. I’d have to agree.

It took another Domainer to figure out that RepublicansForAReason.com wasn’t registered, so its now parked at Sedo. I wonder who the (now former) Republican staffer was who forgot to register that one?

Perhaps it was Senator Ted Stevens, former chair the United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation? Here is Ted explaining what happened:

Will Obama Shape The Future Of The Internet?

2009 is going to be a big year for all of us. ICANN wants to divorce the US government and screw up the Internet with 50 companies running new top-level domains, and application fees at $185,000 each.  This gives them a mere $9,250,000 in cash; then cometh the domain registrations. Can we stop this? Yes we can!

The WSJ is reporting that companies are protesting about the proposed new domain names. Who is going to own .hotel or .bank and how much will they charge for a domain name in those TLD’s? Think about all the brands, variants, trademarks – this is going to be a very costly nightmare for business and lead to mass confusion on the part of the consumer.

ICANN‘s pathetic reason for existence is based on a deal with the US Government which expires in September 2009. The agreement is through the Department of Commerce and is known as the Joint Project Agreement (JPA). Will Obama renew it? What are some of the alternatives to ICANN? Running it through/with the Internet Governance Forum at the United Nations?

Chrome Hijacks 404′s & Discloses Info To Google

A picture tells a thousand words. Lets look at what happens when Google Chrome visits a web page that does not exist:

What Are The Issues?

1. Revenue from 404 pages down. Although that depends on if you park or develop yourself.

2. Look what happens when its http://www.secure-domain-blah.com/user.php?user=john&session=12345678. Google is now in possession of my User ID and session details.

I tried it out on a non existent test script on Domainer Income. For those technical people, this is what it looked like when I ran a packet sniffer over it:

—

66.249.89.100    HTTP    GET /tbproxy/lh/fixurl?hl=en-US&sd=com.au&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.domainerincome.com%2Ftest.php%26id%3Djohn%26session%3D123&sourceid=chrome&error=http404 HTTP/1.1

—

Yep, its sending it to Google alright. So that got me thinking…. what if this script just blindly accepts stuff like…. the Google home page not existing for instance ? I think I’ll leave that one for the kiddies.

3. Did I just consent for this confidential information to be analyzed by Google? Did you notice how it tried to split up the domain name into words for the search box?

Matt Cuts has stated on his blog that “I believe if Google Chrome sees a very short, stock 404 page (less than 512 bytes), it talks to Google in order to try to suggest other possible pages and options.” Interesting choice of words…. I believe….

Although there has been some healthy paranoia around the licensing agreement, I believe that your:

• Google Account: Knows your personal information.
• Google Mail: Analyzes email you send, and email sent to you.
• Maps: Knows where you are – even on your mobile phone.
• Search: Knows what you are looking for.
• Adsense: Knows what you click on = interested in.
• Analytics: Knows what sites you visit.
• Checkout: Knows what you buy and who you buy it from.

Can I make it any clearer than that?

When you put it all together, this is far worse than Microsoft back in the 90′s. What do you think?

Google Chrome Design Began In The 1970′s

After installing Google Chrome, I thought to myself – “I’ve seen this somewhere before“. It wasn’t until I read John Younkers Global By Design did it dawn on me.

Simon was an electronic game launched in 1978 by Milton Bradley. Google, its time to confess. Which 70′s / 80′s product designer “borrowed the idea”??

.UG Regulator Takes A Chill Pill

Back in 2006 the The Uganda Communications Commission (UCC) expressed some concern around the .ug ccTLD. Now there seems to be a change of heart. In an interview, Patrick Mwesigwa, UCC’s technical manager said “There is no immediate intention of claiming that domain name”.

It’s been reported that entrepreneur Charles Musisi has managed Uganda domain names for the past 12 years. He got it from IANA back in 1995.

Apparently there are 4,000 .ug domain names in a country where 50,000 people use the Internet.

The Hidden Dangers In ICANN’s New Proposal

Today, ICANN is going to vote on allowing domain names with non Latin characters. For example, Chinese, Arabic and Cyrillic.

If this proposal goes ahead, its going to be very difficult to distinguish between domains in Latin characters and others such as Cyrillic. What does this mean? It’s going to:

a) increase phishing as organized crime is going to catch on that they can register ebay.com or bank.com using Cyrillic characters. Best of all, those domain names will not be registered because the character sets are different.

b) increase the number of dodgy, misleading domain names that are for sale on auction sites. We all know the good old trick of using an 0 (zero) as opposed to an O (oh). Introducing non Latin characters makes it all that more difficult. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against it entirely – I just think its going to introduce problems – many of which haven’t been thought about or widely discussed.

Will there be another mini landrush to grab all those trademarks using Cyrillic? Who knows. It also presents a problem when you show Cryillic in italics and non italics:

We will see what ICANN comes up with later today.

Still Plenty Of Fish In The Sea

A few weeks ago I was having a conversation with a group of domainers, when someone asked the group if anyone owned a “dictionary word” domain. Everyone looked at each other and paused. I kind of got the feeling that nobody wanted to say anything. So, I did – yes of course! But then someone else jumped in and started complaining about how  people like me grabbed them all up in the “good old days” and that there were “no good domains left”. Of course, I disagreed and gave some examples of domains that I purchased that very week.

Unfortunately, there are those amongst us that can’t complain enough about parking revenue, backordering fees, adsense blah, blah, blah – and I’m tired of it! I don’t want to be around negative people, however I do want to set the record straight.

Here are a few dictionary words that will expire over the next few days:

April 23

altimeters.org
backboards.org
broodmares.com
defectives.org
ferrous.org
hairdrier.org
humanization.org
hymnbooks.org
lariats.org
paratroops.org
pooed.net
premolar.net
setsquare.org
starfruit.org
tensile.org
terrycloth.org
vaquero.org
zealotry.net

April 24

contortion.net
defecated.com
enthral.net
half-baked.net
meriting.com
militarise.com
motorboated.com
peasantry.net
reedit.net
spinally.com

April 25

deactivation.net
gipsies.net
goldfinches.net
moires.com
overmodest.com
prelates.net
presided.net
rebuttals.net
starchier.com
thrushes.net
tromps.com
trustfully.net
turtledoves.net
two-faced.net

April 26

mullein.net
no-no.net
perambulator.net
recommissions.com
tieback.net
titivate.net

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying that you will make a million dollars out of these names, but dictionary words are still around and yes, you can backorder them! Best of luck in the auction.

What The Future Holds For Domainers

The domaining industry is still in its infancy. With that, comes a variety of issues that impact upon private domainers, domaining companies and those that feed from the industry. Some of the issues that come to mind include:

• Lack of understanding of the industry amongst the media and the general public.
• Introduction of legislation by governments.
• Trademark and copyright issues.
• Lack of active industry associations.
• A few bad eggs….

Over the next few weeks I’ll be discussing these issues at length and what we can do as individuals and as a group, to combat these threats.