Web 2.0.11562 beta

Is it my imagination or is the largest registrar on the planet getting increasingly hostile to end users? Recently I had a customer who had some existing domain names that had been set to auto-renew with a credit card that this customer reported as stolen. Needless to say the names now went to PPC pages owned by this registrar, and showed up listed on their auction site. Same awful behavior as before, right?

Well this customer decided to pay the company with the famous well-endowed spokeswoman $80 to re-claim one of their domains from purgatory, otherwise known as pending-delete status. But the others have remained in that status (and listed on the auction site and generating tiny PPC revenue) for two and a half months already.

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Apparently the .im TLD has been opened up for second-level registrations as of the beginning of July. Their pricing is unusual - £40 for normal registrations, £495.00 for “Premium domains with two character names”, and £995.00 for “Premium domains with one character names”. That would explain why “wh.im” is still available.

Still, in the spirit of the numerous http://del.icio.us copycat domains, clever wordsmiths can come up with some good domain names. Similarly I think .ag (Anguilla) still offers plenty of semantic opportunities. Some clever folks will think of many more .in (India) names than the two I mentioned, but I think it’s reasonable to assume far fewer names have been registered in these extensions.

Maybe I’m the only domain name investor who thinks OpenDNS is a good thing. I think it’s good because it leaves a path open for future improvements to the DNS system we all know and love. First some debunking….

The widely touted benefits and exaggerated blogger claims sound like a load of hooey to me. Spamhaus inntegration sounds OK, but this will not change the balance of power in the war against spam. This will help deter phishing attacks, but is by no means anywhere near the end of the story. It’s just not that simple. And yes they will serve many, many ads on pages for not found domains. Not all that different from Verisign’s old Site Finder plan, except as somebody pointed out people opt in to this service.

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In case you haven’t noticed I’ve focused this blog increasingly on the domain name industry and related topics. Yes I’m in the business, and yes I think there’s value that can be realized by topic-oriented blogs. So from now on I’ll try to keep my non-domain name ramblings off this site. My goal then is going to be providing opinion, and if lucky a little insight.

So much hoopla over proposed changes to WHOIS records. Spammers have sent bots out to harvest email addresses from the public records for years now. But there are many benefits to open records that outweigh the alledged benefits of a tiered access system of recordkeeping.

Even worse than bots colecting email addresses, I noticed a few years back that when I transferred domains away from Network Solutions I suddenly got a HUGE spike in junk mail. The relationship was easy to deduce since I used dedicated email addresses to register names there (registrarName@myDomain.) Cause and effect or incredible coincidence?

In the realm of real property public access to ownership information is considered important, so I’m not sure why it should be any different for domain names. People that want to hide property ownership behind a corporate veil can do so, just as people can use inexpensive “private’ registrations to have some other company name show up on the WHOIS record.