At what point is a domain name yours? When you have won the auction and its in your account at the registrar? Think again.
On Feb 2, 2008 I won a Snapnames auction with a final price of US$173. The domain has more than made its money back, yesterday it made US$1.50.
When I won the name at Snapnames, the registration provider was ItsYourDomain.com. The domain expires in December 2008 - so I thought it was about time that I transferred it out to another provider.
Over the past few weeks I’ve been trying to get the name transferred. The domain is in my account, I have the auth code, transfer shield was disabled - everything is ready to go.
The only problem was that it appeared that SecureWhois appeared to be on and therefore my new registrar couldn’t send emails to the admin and technical contacts. Here is what it looked like:
Registrant
Pending Renewal or Deletion
SecureWhois, Inc.
pending-renewal@onlineaccess.net
96 Mowat
Toronto, ON M6K 3M1 CA
+1.4165385428
+1.4163520113 (FAX)
After a number of failed requests to disable SecureWhois, I received this email from their Technical Support staff:
“It looks like the domain had expired long time ago and was deleted from our system, it is now in pending delete status at the Registrar level. If you are interested we can check the price to get the domain back from the registrar.”
I was thinking… wait a minute…. something isn’t right here… I won this thing in Feb! So after writing back to their support dept asking them to “get the domain back immediately” - I decided to give them a call…. and by some miracle, they answered their support number!
It turns out that I never received the domain in the first place! Although the name appeared in my registrar account and I could make changes to it, the domain was “marked in the system” as being a backorder, and not actually “allocated” to me. After feeling somewhat in the twilight zone, I was told that they would immediately put a request through to allocate it to me and that I should see the change in the whois record. Sure enough, the change went through. That domain in my account that I’ve been making $$ from is now… well… mine.
What’s the lesson learned from all of this? Just because you see a domain in your account at your registrar, doesn’t mean its yours! Check the whois record.
P.S. Yes, this is a separate issue from yesterday. I don’t know whether its the “law of attraction” here, but everything seems to be happening at once!
Eureka is the county seat and principal city in Humboldt County, California, United States.
It’s been reported that their Police Department has allowed their domain name to expire.
The new owner of eurekapd.org in Russia has allegedly kept some of the content.
Police Chief Garr Nielsen told the Eureka Reporter that he wasn’t aware of the domain name being taken over and made it clear he didn’t want the Web site online anymore, but the city of Eureka has not yet decided if it is a “problem” or not.
Well… my guess is that it will be - especially when Jack Bauer comes looking for an answer!
It seems that Snapnames is still working on the problems. When you search for domains using the advanced search or search box, you get warning about a certificate expiring:
This is really quite strange as Overture belongs to Yahoo. When you visit the link you get:
To VIP Status: OK
Server Status: OK
The title tag changes to “Hello from Apache :-)”
and then it diverts to the Overture Small Business website. Perhaps Snapnames has included some Yahoo code somewhere?
EuroDNS is hosting a Domainer Meeting in Paris from June 19-20 2008 with a SnapNames Live Auction. Unfortunately I can’t make it to this one, but here are a list of good names to bid on:
Xp.com
Chocolate.net
Receipe.org
Order.net
Silver.net
Italian.net
Denmark.net
Pizza.info
Fotos.net
Podcasts.net
Catholic.eu
Motorbikes.net
Hotels.eu
Versailles.com
If you are in Europe, this would be “the meeting” to check out. FYI: DomainSponsor clients are eligible for a discounted registration code up to €160 off. You can get this by contacting your Account Manager. Hopefully I’ve saved you some $$$.
Just over an hour ago I received notice from Pool:
“We have received notice from Verisign that today’s drop has been cancelled due to technical difficulties on their end. We have been told by Verisign that the domains from today’s drop will be included in tomorrow’s drop. As we receive further information from the registry, we will be sure to keep you advised.”
Like me, you are probably asking, how exactly does a domain name drop get canceled? Hopefully I will have some answers on this soon. Stay tuned!
Traffic Down Under 2008 is being held from November 18-20 at the Gold Coast in Australia. It’s going to be absolutely huge!
For Aussies, it’s the first real domaining conference to be held in Asia/Pacific. This makes it especially attractive for those people who have not previously attended the US Traffic conferences.
For International guests its a great opportunity to get to know the Australian domaining market and enjoy one of Australia’s best holiday destinations. With beaches and ocean views like this, you can see why the Gold Coast is so popular.
In an exclusive interview with DomainerIncome.com, Mike Robertson (Business Development Manager for Fabulous) and Andrew Wright (Marketing Manager for Fabulous), cover everything you need to know about the conference. A full transcript of the interview will be made available shortly.
Pool.com recently notified its customers that their catch and release system will no longer attempt to register domains from customer request queues.I have personally used Pool’s Catch & Release service and was quite puzzled by this move. C&R provided a really easy way to taste names, with minimal risk. It was also a lot cheaper than other companies that provide domain tasting / refunds.
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.
The answer: Whenever the registrar says its not! A couple of really interesting things happened over this past week.
1. The General Manager of the Tucows Domain Portfolio (Bill Sweetman) allegedly said “not all of the expired names end up in the Tucows auction. Some names are renewed by the original registrant before they reach the auction, and some of the names are retained by Tucows for our own portfolio.” I’ll discuss more on this Tucows issue later.
2. I missed out on two names at a Snapnames auction. No - This time it was not halvarez or anyone else; in fact, it didn’t get to auction.
The first name was really good. I was watching it like a hawk and I thought I’d get this without any competition. It was coming from a Snapnames “Priority Partner”, so I knew it was not going anywhere else….. or was it?
The day it was supposed to drop the status was changed to “Backorder” and the expiry went to 2009. Yep, something was not right. I asked Snapnames what happened. They told me that that the owner renewed it the day before the name was due to be released to Snapnames. I did my own checking around and found that to be the case. Content similar to the previous site was back online under the previous owners name.
Well… I thought that I still had a fair few names on backorder…. then BANG, it happened AGAIN! (Or at least I thought it did.) The domain status was changes to “Backorder”. I checked the domain name and this time, it was parked. The old site was gone, there were two pop-unders and the site didn’t look all that appealing. The domain is currently sitting at the Afforda.com registry. When I visit their website and do a whois, I get “Request time out. Please try again.” Lovely!
After waiting a few days to hear back from Snapnames, it turns out that the 2nd domain wasn’t from their Pending Delete queue and Snap didn’t actually get it in the first instance.
It’s been reported that their Police Department has allowed their domain name to expire.
Mike Robertson (Business Development Manager for Fabulous) and Andrew Wright (Marketing Manager for Fabulous), cover everything you need to know about the conference. A full transcript of the interview will be made available shortly.
They produced an 
