.xxx sunrise auctions delayed after 80k applications

ICM Registry has apparently delayed the results of its just-closed .xxx sunrise period until December to give it a chance to clear its backlog of unverified applications.

Corporation Services Company, a major brand-protection registrar, is reporting tonight that ICM and its validation firm, IProta, does not expect to finish validating trademark claims until November 28.

That’s a week later than ICM had planned to kick off the auction phase of the sunrise period, during which contested domains will be awarded to the highest bidder.

“The results of the applications that were submitted during the Sunrise phase will therefore not be available until the first week of December,” CSC said on its blog.

ICM announced yesterday that it has received almost 80,000 sunrise applications from trademark owners and porn companies seeking .xxx domains to match their .coms.

Almost half of those applications were filed during the last week of sunrise. Each trademark claim needs to be individually validated against government databases by IProta.

The plan, according to ICM’s web site, was to start auctioning contested sunrise domains November 21 and to take .xxx into general availability December 6.

Landrush kicks off next Tuesday, running for 17 days. Landrush auctions are scheduled to commence December 12, according to ICM’s web site.

If you pre-register a domain, you are the product

“If you’re not paying for it, you are the product.”

That’s a maxim that has been doing the rounds on the internet for the last few years to describe services such as Facebook, which gets users in for free and then monetizes them to third parties.

It struck me today that this saying also applies to services that allow you to pre-register domain names in non-existent top-level domains.

If you’ve recently registered your interest in a domain in a new gTLD – example.web, say – you’ve gained nothing and potentially lost a lot.

Pre-registering creates two main benefits as I see it, and neither accrues to the registrant.

First, you’re now on the company’s mailing list. When your selected new gTLD(s) go live, the company you pre-registered with is going to try to convert you into a paying customer.

Second, you’ve just freely contributed information to an extremely valuable database, possibly to your own detriment.

When new gTLDs launch, many registries are going to reserve thousands of premium domains to either sell or auction at a later date, to periodically drum up interest in their extensions.

How will these companies decide which domains to add to their premium lists? A database of hundreds of thousands of pre-registrations would be a great place to start looking.

If you pre-register, what you may be doing is voting for your desired domain to be reserved by the registry, for possibly years, and then sold at a large premium.

Something to think about.

One-letter .uk domains coming December 1

Nominet will start taking applications for one and two-letter .co.uk domains next month, starting with a sunrise period for trademark holders.

The registry said 2,831 previously reserved names are being released under its phased process, which also extends to the .org.uk, .net.uk and .me.uk domains.

Nominet’s decision to hold a sunrise – actually it’s planning two – is quite unusual. Other TLDs that have released super-short domains usually carry out an RFP process first.

The first sunrise, for companies with “registered rights” ends January 17. The second sunrise, for those with “unregistered rights” will start at some point after that.

Domains will be auctioned in the event of competing successful applications, with the profits going to the Nominet Trust.

There’s still no firm date on the open-doors landrush phase, in which registrants without trademarks will be able to bid on the domains.

SnapNames settles shill-bidder class action

Domain name auctioneer SnapNames said that it has settled the class action lawsuit filed against it by disgruntled domainers after one of its employees was found to be a shill bidder.

It seems to have had a bit of a result, too. Class members will receive exactly the same amount they would have had they accepted its rebate offer, according to a statement released by the company today.

The case was filed almost a year ago, after it emerged that Nelson Brady, a SnapNames employee, had been posing as a bidder in domain name auctions in order to bump up the final sale price.

Posing as “Hank Alvarez” or “halverez”, Brady stood to gain bonuses based on performance targets as a result of SnapNames’ acquisition by Oversee.net, its current owner.

After the abuse was discovered, SnapNames offered affected customers a rebate equivalent to the money they would have saved on a winning bid had “halvarez” not outbid them.

SnapNames said today:

Class members (which are United States residents who were extended the rebate offer but have not yet accepted) have been or shortly will be notified of the settlement terms and amounts (which are identical to the amounts affected bidders were offered in the rebate offer we extended last November).

This seems to mean that anybody who was holding out for a bigger settlement is out of luck.

The deadline for accepting the rebate expires November 4, but the deadline to become part of the class action is not until December 17.

SnapNames will have paid out $2 million to customers in total.

(I wonder how much the class action attorneys are to receive).

More info can be found at snapsettlement.com.

SnapNames has also settled its lawsuit against Brady for an undisclosed amount. The company sued him for $33 million in May.

Oversee said it “believes the financial penalty is appropriate considering the seriousness of the improper activity”.

NameJet to auction three-letter .pro domains

NameJet has inked a deal with RegistryPro to auction off eleven “premium” three-letter .pro domain names next month.

The domains themselves have not yet been revealed, but the auction is scheduled to kick off November 19, according to a press release today.

RegistryPro, a subsidiary of HostWay, received the the right to start selling previously-restricted one-, two- and three-character .pro domains from ICANN in May 2009.

This June, it allocated nine such domains, including top.pro and 411.pro, via an RFP process.

After it has finished auctioning off its selected short domains, the company plans to put the remainder back into the pool for first-come, first-served registrations.