What’s Wrong With XXX ?

Over the past few days it has been open slather in the media about the ICANN approval of XXX.

With buzzwords like “digital red-light districts“, its parents and the general public who are both concerned and confused.

The Christian Post says it “creates more porn“.

The Obama Admininstration says “This decision goes against the global public interest, and it will open the door to more Internet blocking by governments and undermine the stability and security of the Internet.”

The Australian Sex Party says “it would be an easy thing for the Communications Minister to simply ask all ISP’s in Australian to filter the new domain and all adult material would be denied to adult Australians.”

So, what do you think?

1. What’s really wrong with the concept of XXX ? Nobody is forcing anyone to use it.

2. The .xxx TLD is not going to protect kids from porn, but was it supposed to be designed for that?

3. Is the adult industry boycotting the TLD because they don’t manage it themselves?

4. Is ICANN paying lip service to the Governmental Advisory Committee?

5. Do the anti XXX movement just need some luvin ?

Given there are more than 500,000 domains that have been pre-reserved, are you buying XXX ?

Domainers Go Wild

Two days ago we went public with our Domain Investment Platform. The response was more than we could have imagined. People have been pouring in – signing up day and night. In fact, I stayed up to 3am just answering emails and talking to people who called us on the telephone or jumped on Skype to have a chat.

The great thing for me personally is knowing that people are already reaping the benefits from Domainer Income. I’m not going to mention names, but I thought I’d share some things:

This morning I spoke with a guy who develops domain names in a particular niche. He wanted to know how to use Domainer Income to find specific keyword domains. e.g. weight loss. When I told him he could search our database of 1 million+ domains that are for sale/auction, and showed him how to do it in just 2 clicks, he was blown away. “OMG – there is nothing like this – LOOK how fast THAT is!“.

Last night I had a call from someone who couldn’t believe he could find and buy domains with high PageRank. He went crazy – REALLY over excited – it sounded like he was jumping for joy! He just couldn’t believe it! In Australia, we call it a eureka moment.

As I type this, its 6pm on Friday night – I just got off the phone with another customer who has 5,000 domains – he wanted to know if Domainer Income could help him track his portfolio. Absolutely! Excel spreadsheets are a thing of the past – we keep track of expiry dates, DNS records – the LOT! I think I just got him his life back!

I was also appreciative of the kind comments offered by people on Facebook and Twitter.

Over the past couple of days, *many* people have reached out and shared with me their stories and frustrations with existing tools. The thing is – I agree! We created this investment platform well before anything else was out there. Now the cat has been let out of the bag. We have raised the bar considerably and we are going to keep raising it!

Out of all the people I’ve talk to, chatted with and received emails from, one common theme has emerged. Its the the lack of information sharing in the domaining industry. People just can’t believe we have published the information we have on Domainer Income. In fact, pretty much everyone I’ve spoken to has said “thank you”. One prominent domainer (who will remain nameless) cautioned me that many domainers might feel threatened that we have “levelled the playing field“. My response was “too bad, so sad“. I used to have the scarcity mindset, but not any more.

One final example: one of our Free Members emailed me personally to say he would love to upgrade to the Professional membership and get all the analytics and metrics from domain auctions, as well as the portfolio management tools. In the email he said thanks for creating the Free membership as it gave him access to our Expired Domains database (which we update daily). He said that he is going to work his way up to participating in larger auctions. That was really nice to hear because I know $$$ can be tight for some people.

To see which membership is right for you, go here.

New gTLD’s – Just Remakes of 80′s Pop Songs?

“All this has happened before, and all this will happen again“. – Battlestar Galactica (Pythia).

Back in 2001, a company called New.net published a piece of software (.dll file) which enabled people to resolve domain extensions such as .xxx .law .kids and .church and many others. They also teamed up with ISP’s to provide the service. Check it out yourself at archive.org (and before you ask, it wasn’t me who did the johnson.family that’s in the middle of the page).

In any case, these “domains” were not real TLD’s, as we know them today. Many people called them subdomains or an “alternative DNS root”. This wasn’t the first time that these extensions appeared either; Eugene Kashpureff ran Alternic in the mid 90′s, and directly challenged Internic. That was actually fun to watch. Alternic also had .xxx too.

Here are a few extensions that New.Net were marketing back then:

agent
arts
auction
chat
church
club
family
free
game
gmbh
golf
hola
inc
kids
law
llc
llp
love
ltd
med
mp3
school
scifi
shop
soc
sport
tech
travel
video
xxx

Why is this relevant today? The ICANN board meets to discuss .XXX. Will they approve it after all these years? I’m guessing they will. This whole debate has gone on long enough.

Got some new ideas for a gTLD?