Mastering your domain space

22nd November, 2004. This article first appeared in the November, 2004 issue of easyJet’s in flight magazine – www.easyjetinflight.com

You might reasonably think that a decade after the internet started to be widely known, all those amusing spats about name ownership would be ancient history. Not a bit of it.

Henry Maxwell, bespoke bootmakers to, among others, HM Queen Elizabeth II, discovered the problems of domain ownership earlier this year with henrymaxwell.com. The company failed to re-register it and when it expired it was bought by someone else. Now type henrymaxwell.com into your browser and you get redirected to a site whose robust content is more about booty than boots.

“We‚Äôre to blame really,” says general manager Peter Martin, “we just weren‚Äôt interested enough and we let it lapse.” This is, he explains, a real problem for smaller companies. Henrymaxwell.com had been registered through a third party which provided email and web services. But these were fairly expensive, so the business rather lost interest. And, when it lapsed, a pornographer jumped in and snapped it up.

Naturally they were aghast. But, says Martin, ‚ÄúThere was nothing we could really do. We looked into getting it back but that was far too expensive.” Luckily Henry Maxwell is not the company‚Äôs main brand (which is Foster and Son) nor does it do a huge amount of business over the internet. So they took it on the chin, dropped the .com, registered .co.uk and changed the stationery.

This type of small-scale problem is only the tip of the iceberg though, says Penny Hearn, a director of Edinburgh- based Demys, which provides global internet country code management for businesses. For many companies the ‘online component‚Äô of their name or names is still something of an afterthought. This myopia is not just confined to existing trademarks, either. “A lot of companies go a long way down the road to creating a brand before they even think about the domain,” she continues. “Then they discover someone else has been using it for years.”

The problems here divide broadly into three categories— problems with names that you already own, problems with names you want, and problems with names that are similar to yours, and the range of available suffixes.

Names you own

As with Henry Maxwell, many problems in the first group stem from the anarchic way the web has developed. Because domains are never really owned, only registered, usually for periods between a year and a decade, at the end of the time, if the owner fails to renew, the name becomes available again.

Because in its early days, the net was something of a land grab, these things were often done in a very piecemeal fashion. So a business may discover that it‚Äôs actually an employee who owns the domain—because they were asked to buy it with their credit card. Or it may even be that its domain is owned by the design company that originally set up the website.

In the latter case this can lead to all sorts of problems. If the design company goes bust, the business‚Äôs domain could appear on a secondary market without it ever knowing. Well known second-hand domains are unlikely to remain free for long, as they usually attract ‘legacy traffic‚Äô, making them attractive to pornographers, dubious loan purveyors and the like. In a similar vein, if the business falls out with the design company in question, the latter could easily hold it to ransom.

Single employee ownership, adds Hearn, can also be a problem, especially when the employee’s name is down as the administrator for the domain. What if that employee has now left? The business could have its name expire from under it and never know until all the email suddenly stops working.

For these reasons, Hearn explains, the first step Demys often takes is to conduct an audit of exactly which domains the business owns or thinks it owns, mapping them onto its brands and looking for potential gaps. For instance, if a business is planning to move a brand from the UK into other European countries, it ought to be looking at acquiring at least the big market suffixes: .de, .fr, .it, .es and so on.

Names you don’t own

The second category is rather more straightforward. If someone else has registered your name, you can either buy it from them or dispute it. But beware—you won‚Äôt necessarily win. Both sting.com and armani.com were owned by individuals. Both were taken to arbitration by the obvious parties, and in both cases the little guy won. The former because his nickname was Sting and the latter because his name was A. R. Mani. Though it should be noted that both have now sold out, presumably for hefty sums.

Even worse, simply checking that your name is free can be fraught with peril. Shady cyber characters can ‘sniff‚Äô the packets of data arriving at registration sites, and seeing that companies are looking to see if domains are free, sneak in under the wire. This happened to Brandon Hire plc.

They wanted to register brandonhire.co.uk—it was free and they booked it , but when they came back with a credit card two hours later it had been taken. ‚ÄúIt was people scanning the registration site,” says Brandon‚Äôs head of IT Russ Mitton, ‚Äúand they then turned round and said ‘do you want to buy it for x-thousand pounds?‚Äô”

Luckily someone at Brandon discovered that the other party’s payment had yet to be formally acknowledged, so having been leapfrogged, they then leapfrogged the cyberopportunist and wrested their name back.

Similar names

The final problem occurs with similar names and other suffixes. Similar names, like wwwtesco.com (designed to redirect people who miss out the dot) or www.tescostores.com may be worth registering as some people, at some point, are bound to type them. More interesting though are other suffixes. For instance, you may use .com, but you may also wish to register .net, .co.uk, .biz, .org and so forth. The fun that can happen when you don’t is well documented.

One of the best-known examples of this was PricewaterhouseCooper’s inane (and abortive) stab at rebranding its consultancy arm as Monday. To this end, it set up a site called introducingmonday.com. But it didn’t buy the .co.uk, which was snapped up by cyber pranksters. When people went to the site, rather than a load of rebranding waffle, they were treated to gleeful dancing V-signs.

More recently, the UK government‚Äôs preparingforemergencies. gov.uk had its terrorism information site mercilessly skewered by the .co.uk version (brought to you by the ‘department of vague paranoia‚Äô), which, ignoring its own advice, the government had failed to register.

The .us still hasn’t reached 1 million registrations

It’s somewhat of a surprise that the United States’ own domain name extension, the .us, still isn’t home to more than 1 million names.

The count is up to 987,034, as of today. That’s 1,248 new names from the day before while in the same 24h period, 692 domains were deleted for a daily gain of 556 domains. Not bad but still, it’s a far cry from the .com’s gain, yesterday alone, of a whopping 561,137 new names registered… wow!

Is this a good time to remind you to buy your own domain name registry?

Maybe not but still, anyone would feel good about getting at least part of this bustling .com domain name growth.

The .com, .net and .biz domains are on the upswing with significant daily gains but the .org and .info are losing ground, fast. If you’re unsure about which domain suffix to use for your business, the .com is still “king of hill”.

The good news for the .us is that, if the numbers hold, there could be over 1 million domain names registered within a few weeks.

Let’s keep an eye on where things go with this emerging but nevertheless prestigious ccTLD.

Volkswagen gets the polo.eu domain name

There’s been very intense competition to land the coveted polo.eu domain name and as expected, three relevant registrants intended to get their hands on it but only one got it.

Volkswagen finally won the bid over Ralph Lauren (makers of the famous Polo clothing line) and Swiss-based Nestl?©. NetNames said all these companies applied within five minutes of each other and, for instance, Ralph Lauren missed out on the polo.eu name by 3:24 minutes!

The much announced .eu domain extension was launched back in December of 2005 and will be available to the general public around the end of April 2006. The available domains are attributed on a first-come, first-serve basis. Applicants are given forty days to prove their ownership of a trademark for the name they’ve requested.

The RIAA requests a 30% cut of Sirius’ revenues

Speaking at a Bear Stearns conference, Sirius Satellite Radio‘s Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer David Frear said that the RIAA and member record labels are pursuing a 30% share of revenue as “royalties”.

The satellite radio company, along with rival XM Radio, already pays a licensing fee to record labels and this request for more money follows Sirius’ recent earnings report that shows surging revenues of $80.0 million compared to the $25.2 million the quarter before.

Speaking on February 28, Frear said that Sirius should not have to pay any more than what it already does. In addition, he said that record labels aren’t happy with the company’s new S50 radio that can record Sirius boradcasts.

Sirius currently pays around 6% of its revenue to RIAA record labels. This rate will have to be renegotiated by June 30, 2006.

ICANN approves VeriSign to handle the .com… forever

It appears the ICANN has finally approved a -very- controversial .com contract that will see VeriSign handed control of the internet’s most famous product… forever!

The contract still has to be approved by the US government, which should be a formality, although at least one congressman has written to the head of the Department of Commerce recommending the deal be shot down.

Perhaps he’s the only one who sees this is a genuinely bad idea.

The controversy reigns over several elements in the new contract. For one, it provides VeriSign with a “presumptive right of renewal” over the dotcom registry – effectively handing one company complete control of all dotcom domains forever, reports The Register.

Here’s a copy of the official press release:

ICANN Board Approves VeriSign Settlement Agreements

Marina del Rey, California, 28 February 2006: Today, ICANN’s Board of Directors approved, by a majority vote, a set of agreements settling a long time dispute between ICANN and VeriSign, the registry operator for the .COM registry.

These settlement documents include a new registry agreement relating to the operation of the .COM registry. The new .COM registry agreement will now proceed to the U.S. Department of Commerce for final approval, and the entire settlement is dependent upon this approval before it is finalized.

USDOC approval is required due to the unique history of the .COM generic top-level domain and it is the only gTLD which requires such approval. If approved, this settlement will clear the way for a new and productive relationship between ICANN and VeriSign facilitating ICANN’s stewardship and technical coordination of the Internet’s domain name system.

ICANN’s Board voted 9 to 5 in favor of the settlement agreements with one director abstaining. Affirmative votes were cast by the following Board Members: Vint Cerf (Chairman), Alejandro Pisanty (Vice-Chairman), Mouhamet Diop, Demi Getschko, Hagen Hultzsch, Veni Markovski, Vanda Scartezini, Paul Twomey (President and CEO), and Hualin Qian. Directors who voted against the approval of the settlement documents were: Raimundo Beca, Susan Crawford, Joichi Ito, Njeri Rionge, and Peter Dengate Thrush. Director Michael Palage abstained.

Statements by Board members on their votes will be posted on the ICANN website within the next two days.

In other business during today’s meeting, the ICANN Board approved seven separate recommendations by ICANN’s ccNSO (Country-Code Name Supporting Organization) regarding improvements and clarifications to the ICANN Bylaws. One recommendation was put over for additional discussion with the ccNSO at ICANN’s upcoming meeting in Wellington, New Zealand scheduled for the last week of March.

These policy recommendations were presented to the ICANN Board from the first policy development process (ccPDP) conducted by the ccNSO. This successful policy development process generated from the ccTLD community was a significant milestone for ICANN’s technical coordination of the Internet’s domain name system.

All in all, it’s bad news for all .com owners since the administration will probably be passed over to an overly mercantile, privately owned group… this is all against the spirit of the internet.

What were the people at ICANN thinking when they approved this?

The .au Domain Administration fears landing pages

With almost every single domain authority around the world, renting a domain name for the purpose of operating any variation of pay-per-click landing pages isn’t an issue.

It seems the Australian auDA has a different opinion:

Domain name registrations under the “close and substantial connection” rule

The “close and substantial connection” rule was introduced in 2002. It was intended to provide a limited degree of flexibility for registrants to register domain names that are not derived from their own company or business name, but are nevertheless connected to them in some way. Refer to section 10 of the Guidelines for Accredited Registrars on the Interpretation of Policy Rules for the Open 2LDs (2005-02).

auDA has ruled in the past that it is acceptable under the close and substantial connection rule to register domain names for the purpose of providing Internet directory services or information portals. For example, if a registrant provides a real estate directory service then it would be acceptable for them to register domain names that are connected with that service (eg. houses.com.au, apartments.com.au, land.com.au, estateagent.com.au and so on).

It has recently come to auDA’s attention that some registrants have been using this interpretation of the close and substantial connection rule to register large numbers of domain names apparently for the primary purpose of capturing web traffic and/or selling click-through advertising.

auDA is currently considering whether this practice is acceptable under the close and substantial connection rule.

Until auDA has issued a policy clarification, registrants who engage in this practice should be aware that auDA reserves the right to delete the domain names for breach of policy.

The policy should be challenged by every domain owner since “commercial” suffixes like “.com.au” are destined to be used commercially. PPC landing pages should be considered a legitimate “commercial use” in almost all instances.

Let’s hope the auDA gets back to their senses… sooner than later.

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