Recent Posts
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As judge freezes assets, is this OnlineNic domain portfolio really worth $70,000?
Kevin Murphy,
July 26, 2021, 14:29:04 (UTC),
Domain Registrars
A California court has frozen the assets of beleaguered Chinese/American registrar OnlineNic, at the behest of Facebook, which is suing the company for alleged cybersquatting.
The judge in the case Friday mostly granted Facebook’s request for a temporary restraining order, banning OnlineNic from transferring money or domains out of the country.
It had discovered that the registrar had started transferring domains it has registered in its own name — about 600 of them — out of the country, to China-based Ename.
OnlineNic had told the court it could no longer afford to defend the case, and that it would shut up shop July 26.
Following Facebook’s request for a TRO, the registrar said it was merely moving the names to Ename so it could use its secondary market platform to raise $70,000 of the $75,000 needed to pay the so-called “Special Master”.
This is a court-appointed agent who had conducted a review of OnlineNic’s ticketing system records and found the company had deleted or obfuscated huge chunks of potential evidence.
OnlineNic has now told the court that it’s found a potential buyer, willing to pay $70,000 for the names in question.
I’m no domain broker — I’m not even a domain investor — but even I have to wonder who would pay $70,000, or about $120 per name, for this junk. By sight alone, hardly any of them seem to be worth the base reg fee.
I’m guessing they’re dropped domains with traffic and/or the opportunity of selling them back to a forgetful original registrant.
there are some decent ones that have liquid value but no where near 70k
I spotted about 40 that had some obvious “value” or utility and back-of-napkin calcs put that at around 30k, the rest isn’t worth even renewing IME