Did Harry and Meghan squat the Queen? [clickbait]

With tabloid rags everywhere continuing to clamor for any scrap of information that might drive a rift between the Duke and Duchess of Sussex and Queen Elizabeth II, perhaps it was inevitable that domain names would one day enter the fray.

And now they have, with the registrations of lilibetdiana.com and lilidiana.com making headlines this week.

Lilibet Diana Mountbatten-Windsor, Harry and Meghan’s second child and first daughter, was born at 1940 UTC on June 4.

“Diana” is of course a tribute to the Duke’s late mother, the Princess of Wales, while “Lilibet” is a reference to the Queen’s childhood nickname and the pet name by which her recently deceased husband, Phillip, addressed her.

The choice of name has been seen partly as an effort to renovate bridges that were charred when the Sussexes decoupled themselves from the taxpayer’s teat, abandoned royal duties, and buggered off to America to talk smack about their family on Oprah.

Reports quickly emerged that the choice of name might have been made without first seeking the Queen’s permission — reports that have been strenuously denied, backed by a threat of legal action.

But Whois records, as mostly useless as they are nowadays, have now stepped in to complicate matters.

According to Whois, lilibetdiana.com was registered just a few hours prior to the birth, June 4, presumably while the Duchess was in labor. But lilidiana.com was registered a few days earlier, on May 31. Both were registered via GoDaddy.

The Sussexes spokespeople tole The Telegraph that the names were merely two among many that were registered defensively in advance of the birth, before the couple had committed to a name:

Of course, as is often customary with public figures, a significant number of domains of any potential names that were considered were purchased by their team to protect against the exploitation of the name once it was later chosen and publicly shared.

Interestingly, lilibetdiana.uk and lilibetdiana.co.uk, which one might imagine would be on the defensive reg checklist, were only registered after the announcement of her birth on June 6, and via a different registrar, suggesting third-party ownership.

Three questions emerge from the Whois-related revelations:

First, do the records support the assertion by anonymous Palace sources that the Queen was not consulted in advance, or the contrary claim from the Sussexes?

Two, does anyone actually really care? I lost interest several paragraphs ago.

And C), am I really about to hit “Publish” on this article?

If you’re reading this, I guess I did. I’m sorry. I’m off to take a long, hot shower, to wash away the shame.

Disclosure: I sold Tucows shares

TL;DR — I made about $3,700 selling Tucows shares.

I’ve never been much of an investor in anything, largely because I’ve never really had the disposable income. However, back in 2006, when I lived in the US, I opened an online share-trading account and bought around $1,000 worth of shares in various technology companies.

The companies included what at the time I considered safe bets: Dell, AMD, Yahoo! and Adobe. Everyone still uses Yahoo, right?

But I also bought 50 shares of Tucows, the domain name registrar, for $3.75 a pop. I recall being inspired by a post from original ICANN blogger Bret Fausett, who coincidentally now works for Tucows, in which he touted the stock.

I left the US at the end of 2007 and went travelling for a while before returning to the UK.

At some point in 2009, when I tried to sell up and close the account, I was told that because I no longer had the US bank account I signed up with, I would be unable to access the funds.

So I pretty much chalked the experience down to an idiot tax and forgot all about it.

In 2010 I launched this web site.

Recently, I remembered the account and, trading platform policies having changed in the meantime, discovered I probably would be able to access the funds after all.

That $1,000 had turned into over $19,000 over the intervening 15 years, and the Tucows position had grown by almost 2,000%, a gain of over $3,700.

I’ve sold all my shares and am in the process of closing the account. After that, I won’t own any shares in any companies.

In short, I’m probably going to make a few grand by selling Tucows stock that I’ve owned for the last 15 years but which, until recently, I thought I’d lost forever.

Make of that what you will.

I’m disclosing it now not because I think I’ve had any market-moving impact on the stock over the years, but because it just seems like the kind of thing that needs to be disclosed.

Outrage at ICANN’s new “clown shoes” social distancing mandate

ICANN has been slammed by community members after announcing a return to in-person public meetings this year, but only to attendees wearing clown shoes.

The Org said the new rule, which will come into force at ICANN 71 in The Hague this June, was “a bold but necessary measure to enforce social distancing in the pandemic era”.

ICANN CEO Göran Marby said in a blog post that the clown shoes will have to be “brightly colored” and a minimum of 3ft (0.91 meters) in length, to ensure attendees are standing at least 6ft (1.82 meters) away from each other at all times.

“ICANN is the most important organization in the world, and it is imperative that we return to in-person meetings as quickly as possible,” he wrote.

“As your leader, I firmly believe that a compulsory clown shoes mandate is the best way to achieve this goal,” he said.

Clown shoes will be handed out to attendees at the front desk of The Hague Convention Center “after they receive their lanyards but before they receive their anal swab”, added VP of global communications Karen K Karenson.

Small teams of ICANN Compliance staff will patrol the halls of the venue, looking for rule-breakers, ICANN warned.

Those found to be not wearing clown shoes will have a bucket of water thrown over them, Marby said.

“I can’t stress this enough — it really is water in the bucket,” he said. “No, for reals, it’s water in there, trust me.”

The new policy immediately came under fire from influential community members, including the chair of the GNSO Outrage Committee, They Them.

“I’ve been coming to ICANN meetings for 20 years,” Them said. “If admitting that wasn’t humiliating enough, now I’ve got to wear clown shoes too?”

Them additionally complained that the policy discriminates against less-abled meeting attendees, such as those using wheelchairs.

ICANN said in response that it has purchased a tiny, battery-powered clown car that can comfortably fit up to 25 such community members for as much as 20 minutes before the doors all fall off in a puff of confetti.

The new rule is believed to be the brainchild of ICANN’s deputy general counsel, Dave O’Hallorohalloran, who has been wearing clown shoes for his entire career.

Sources say he had been suggesting the clown shoes policy for many years before the pandemic hit.

RobinHood.club showered with five-star reviews after .com confusion

In a world where it’s still common for internet users to automatically assume companies use the .com version of their brand, instead of a new gTLD, it’s sometimes refreshing to see the opposite scenario occur.

It was a mixed blessing for a German price comparison app developer, which found itself confused with an American stock-trading app of the same name this week.

The company, which uses robinhood.club as its primary domain, received a handful of negative, one-star reviews on the Google app store, apparently from people who confused it with the scandal-hit trading app, which can be found at robinhood.com.

The American RobinHood was of course the app of choice for the Reddit users who last week clubbed together to pump the stock of floundering bricks-and-mortar games retailer GameStop, in order to frustrate the plans of big short-selling hedge funds and in many cases make some healthy profits screwing over The Man.

When RobinHood limited trading of GameStop and other stocks, it faced accusations of siding with billionaire Wall Street pros at the expense of armchair investors, and the unaffiliated German app maker seems to have taken some of the overspill of this criticism.

But the negative impact was short-lived. When news of the confusion filtered back to Reddit, hundreds of users — who presumably had never used the app — flooded to the store to leave five-star reviews to counteract the one-stars.

At time of writing, every review appears to be related in one way or the other to the stock-trading scandal, and the German app holds an average rating of over four stars.

DI World Global International Headquarters is relocating

After 10 years based in London, DI Global World International HQ is moving.

Any client, partner, friend or contact who currently has a London mailing address for DIWIGHQ in their Rolodex or database should probably delete that address forthwith.

Anything currently in the mail or sent over the next few weeks will probably find its way to my inbox eventually, but after that all bets are off.

A new location for the International Global World HQ it still TBD.

The current plan is to bubble up with family for several months, riding out the worst of the pandemic, before picking a more permanent home when travel restrictions loosen up some.

If you need an address to post something to in the meantime, ask me privately.

As an aside, one surprising thing I’ve discovered about myself while packing up the old HQ over the last few days is that I’ve apparently been a secret hoarder this whole time.

I don’t believe I’ve thrown away a single piece of schwag from ICANN meetings or industry conferences for over a decade.

T-shirts, backpacks, stickers, torches, magnets, badges, pins, buttons, pens, pencils, notebooks, webcam covers, mints, gum, hand sanitizer, USB gizmos, flight socks, maple syrup, wine, reams and reams of slick promotional bosh…

With hindsight, I should have bundled it all up and sold the lot to a gullible industry fanboy via a seasonal charity auction.

But by now it’s all already rotting at the bottom of an East London landfill, and the poor old orphaned donkeys will just have to starve.

Watch three members of the ICANN community get assassinated

Three members of the ICANN community got killed by an assassin in a 2012 movie, now available on Amazon Prime, I inexplicably had never heard about until today.

The film’s called Rogue Hunter, and it’s produced and directed by prominent community member Jonathan Zuck, who’s been involved in ICANN representing intellectual property interests for the last 15 years.

It’s about… 55 minutes long.

It’s about… I dunno. A foxy female assassin or something? Maybe. The audio during the exposition scenes was pretty ropey. My feeling was that it’s drawing a lot from The Bourne Identity.

Zuck himself, alongside Steve DelBianco and Andrew Mack, both former chairs of the ICANN Business Constituency, all have cameos in which they get killed.

Here’s the trailer for the film, featuring DelBianco getting offed near the Taj Mahal (presumably shortly after the 2008 ICANN 31 meeting in New Delhi).

But is it any good?

No. The movie is fucking terrible.

But it’s firmly in the “So Bad It’s Good” zone.

And I laughed my balls off.

It’s not quite a classic of the genre — it’s no The Room — because it seems pretty clear that Zuck and his colleagues knew they were making a terrible film. There’s deliberate humor in the script and the direction.

The film was released in 2012, and somehow got on to Amazon Prime two years ago, where it has one one-star review:

Poor camera work, poor lighting, poor story line, poor acting just really all round dreadful.

I don’t think that reviewer really “got” what the makers were going for. Maybe, if you choose to watch the movie and review it, you could help redress the balance.

I should point out that there’s a bit of nudity and a somewhat explicit sex scene in the film, so you probably shouldn’t watch it with your boss or your kids watching over your shoulder.

Bored? Try the DI Fiendishly Difficult Domain Name Pub Quiz

One of the many trends to emerge since most of the world went into coronavirus lockdown is the emergence of the online pub-style quiz as a way to kill time while we wait for normality to resume or death to kick in.

This gave me a great idea: why not copy this idea?

While most of these quizzes are usually conducted over YouTube or some other streaming platform, I’ve long been told I have a face for radio and a voice for print, so you’re going to have to make do with text.

So, here I present the inaugural DI Fiendishly Difficult Domain Name Pub Quiz.

It’s split into rounds that should test the breadth and depth of your domain industry and ICANN knowledge to their fullest.

There are no prizes. It’s just a bit of fun.

Go ahead and test yourself, your boss isn’t looking!

The Trivia Round

• Which two alcoholic beverages feature on Domain Name Journal’s list of the top 20 secondary-market cash sales of all time?
• What’s the only one of ICANN’s five geographic regions not to have had one of its citizens elected chair of ICANN’s board of directors?
• Which horror movie director publicly called GoDaddy founder Bob Parsons a “sick fuck” in 2011?
• How many companies applied for the .web gTLD in 2012?
• Over 170 domainers got a nasty bacterial infection during the DomainFEST conference in 2011. Which saucy place did they catch it? I’m looking for the location, not the body part.

The ccTLD Round

There are over 200 ccTLDs in active use today. How many can you match to the correct country, and vice versa?

First, name the countries or territories associated with the following five ccTLDs:

• .aq
• .tw
• .bb
• .bj
• .lr

Now, name the ccTLDs for the following five countries or territories:

• Myanmar
• Macao
• Mali
• Morocco
• Mauritania

The Acronym Round

These are all acronyms used in the domain name industry and ICANN community, but what do they stand for?

• MX
• EPDP
• NPOC
• LGR
• SSAC

The Spot-the-gTLD Round

Some of these gTLDs are real, some are not. But which is which?

• .jcrew
• .blockbuster
• .toysrus
• .tjmaxx
• .paylessshoesource

The Anagram Round

These five strings are all anagrams of well-known people or well-known companies in the domain/ICANN space. Solve the anagrams. If you follow DI on Twitter and have a long memory, these might be a little easier for you.

• barman orgy
• cretin clan
• enema chap
• boner storm
• lewd anal manner

Bonus Round — Name That Beard

For a bonus point, whose beard is this?

The Answers

There are 31 points on offer, and I’ll post the answers early next week. If you’re impatient, pretty much everything here is Googleable.

But remember, you’d only be cheating yourself!

If you enjoyed this, or like some bits but not others, let me know in the comments on via other channels. If there’s sufficient positive feedback, I may make this a regular feature.

Five SAFE ways to buy and sell domains during the coronavirus pandemic

The coronavirus pandemic has hit every profession hard, and the domain industry is no exception.

Domain investors, many of whom are self-employed, lack health insurance, and are simply unable to self-isolate, may be among the hardest-hit. But no fear, I’ve put together some advice that should help you plucky domainers make it through the current crisis unscathed.

Here’s the DI Top Five Totally Legit Tips For Safe Domaining:

• 1. Avoid domain stores. The Covid-19 virus is airborne, and can linger on hard surfaces for many hours, so it makes a lot of sense to avoid bricks-and-mortar domain stores. Believe it or not, alternatives are available. Instead of visiting your local branch of GoDaddy, why not consider staying at home and using the GoDaddy web site instead? It’s quick, simple, and a lot less hazardous to your health. Hey presto! Your domain should be delivered to your door by a FedEx guy in full hazmat gear in as little as 10 business days.
• 2. Refrain from selling door-to-door. Carrying a suitcase full of premium domains around the streets and cold-calling at people’s front doors may be a tried and tested method of selling names, but in this era of social distancing, it’s no longer recommended. If you have a computer, why not set up an electronic mail account on the internet and use it to approach potential buyers remotely instead? They’ll appreciate it, and so will your feet!
• 3. Limit in-person transfers. Once you and your buyer have sealed the deal, the next logical step is obviously to meet up and hand over the domain for the agreed-upon price. But many modern registrars allow their customers to transfer domains automatically online, which is a lot safer during a pandemic. If an in-person transfer is unavoidable, remember to meet your buyer in a large, public, open space and stand at least two meters (six feet) apart at all times. Do NOT shake hands — an elbow-bump or kiss on the lips will suffice — and be sure to wipe down the domain with a disinfectant cloth before placing it on the ground and backing away.
• 4. Avoid expired domains. Domains that have already passed their expiry date are risky to your health at the best of times, but current World Health Organization advice recommends avoiding expired domains altogether in order to protect your immune system. Remember: if in doubt, throw it out!
• 5. Buy as many “coronavirus” domains as you can. Everyone on the planet is currently obsessed with the pandemic, so it stands to reason that domain names related to the disease are surely worth many thousands of dollars each, if not millions. Experts at Verisign currently recommend that investors register as many .com domains as they can comprised of the words “coronavirus” or “covid-19” followed by literally any other word or string of digits. Domainers should also remember to buy the hyphenated AND non-hyphenated versions, just to be safe, Verisign says. And they should know — they’re all millionaires!

I hope this advice helps!

Stay indoors, social distance, and remember to take a hot bath every time you sneeze.

At ICANN 67, nobody knew you’re a dog

Want to see what your fellow ICANN 67 attendees looked like on the other side of the Zoom chat room?
The meeting may have been held entirely remotely, but that hasn’t stopped the ICANN org from populating its Flickr page with a big wedge of photos, one of which seems to prove the old adage that “On the internet, nobody know’s you’re a dog.”

Photo credit: @icannphotos
At regular, face-to-face ICANN meetings, there’s a professional photographer doing the rounds, doing his or her level best to make jet-lagged, bearded. middle-aged men sitting in circles at laptops look thrusting and dynamic.
This time, it was largely up to remote participants to submit their own mug shots, taken in their home offices, kitchens, and lounges, for your viewing delight. And what a jolly nice bunch of people they look.
The batch of photos from 67 also includes a number taken on-site at ICANN’s Los Angeles headquarters, which had been hastily rigged up to act as the meeting’s hub after the face-to-face meeting in Cancun, Mexico was cancelled over coronavirus fears.
Here.

Domain Incite turns 10 today. What the fuck have I done with my life?

February 27, 2010. That was the day, 10 years ago today, I registered domainincite.com and posted my first post.
Seriously, what the fuck have I done with my life?
Back in 2009, during a hiatus from my previous life as an all-round Silicon Valley tech reporter, I was back in the UK as a budding comedy writer with his foot in the door at the BBC and a handful of broadcast credits.
I made about £1,000 that year. A BBC producer told me that, if I was lucky enough and good enough, my radio sitcom spec script might get commissioned, but that it would take a couple of years and I would probably only make about three grand.
I figured it was time to get a proper job, and do comedy in the evenings, so started doing some regular freelancing, for The Register at first and then something called Thinq (I think, the site doesn’t appear to exist any more).
Around the same time, a friend at a domain registry made me an unsolicited offer of work, ghost-writing white papers for a buck a word. I took it.
I think it was early January 2010 that I first started thinking about starting up my own blog. I was probably inspired by security reporter Brian Krebs, who I admired and who’d recently left the Washington Post to launch Krebs On Security.
Internet security and domain names were the two areas of tech where I calculated I had the knowledge and contacts to make a go of it as a solo enterprise. I’d always been slightly more drawn to the domain name side, and that was the area where it looked like I could find a niche.
I was of course already aware of Andrew Allemann’s excellent Domain Name Wire and a few other blogs, but it seemed to me there were very much focused on the domainer part of the industry and there was an opportunity to focus more on the the sell-side and ICANN-related news.
The good thing about ICANN was that, even if the organization was not interested in talking to a lowly blogger, its transparency regime would mean there would be no shortage of material for anyone prepared to trawl through a 200-page PDF for nuggets, I reckoned.
And, like the security beat, there would be no shortage of scumbags to write about.
I recall brainstorming branding ideas with my dad in his living room, 10 years ago today.
I wanted something that conveyed a certain cheekiness or snarkiness. I didn’t want DI to be a dry recounting of events. No doubt influenced by years of enjoying The Register, and my brief foray into the world of comedy, I wanted to be humorous without resorting to fabrication, satire, or parody.
My first domain preference was already registered by a domainer. I offered him $100 for it. He countered with $1,000, and that was the end of that negotiation. He still owns it.
When I settled upon the punny domainincite.com, I was fully aware that it failed the radio test, but I was not too concerned. I figured the chances of my ever having to spell it out on the radio were pretty slim (it only took a couple of years to be proven wrong about that) and it did not seem to affect my ability to get people to read the site.
A few months later, I showed up at ICANN’s public meeting in Brussels, my first in-person meeting for a few years.
I recall walking the streets near the venue and having to stop and shake hands with a familiar face every few minutes. It very much felt like I’d rediscovered a community I had never really considered myself a part of previously. Most of them were already enthusiastic DI readers.
It felt pretty good.
Almost a decade later, I’m a much more miserable person, and I find myself asking: what the fuck have I done with my life?
I write about domain names for a living.
Domain names.
Entries in a database.
I’ve spent a decade thinking about what most people will probably never consider spending 10 minutes thinking about.
Not only does my domain fail the radio test, but my career choice almost always fails the taxi driver test (or, less frequently, the Tinder date test).
I’m sure most people reading this post will know what I’m talking about. You’re stuck in traffic with a chatty cabby, and before long you’re attempting to explain what you do for a living.
His eyes glaze over.
“No, no,” you say. “Some of it’s really, really interesting.”
Then you roll out your top few anecdotes — probably about wedge issues like censorship, or big secondary market sales — and before you know it the driver has fallen unconscious and fucked the car through the window of a convenience store, seriously injuring an elderly woman.
You try to explain to the arriving police what happened, but when it gets to the bit about what you do for a living you’re very quickly arrested for wasting police time.
You now have a permanent criminal record and no chance of being employed by anyone else. The elderly woman eventually recovers, but you don’t. You’re stuck. Stuck!
It’s happened to all of us, I’m sure.
The ticking over of a decade is always a time for reflection, is what I’m getting at.
Having done a fair bit of that recently, I like to think I’ve made more friends than enemies writing DI, but I’m sure a lot of those people who shook my hand in Brussels now think I’m a utter prick.
This goes with the territory for any reporter, but it’s a lot harder to bear when you’re solo. The life of a blogger can be a lonely one. There’s no bustling newsroom banter, no editor to give you advice on tricky stories, no subs to catch your typoes, no lawyers to get your back when you screw up.
It’s easy in that situation to become soft.
While I treat every company, organization or individual I write about as fairly as I can, I’ve started to wonder whether sometimes I’m too quick to default to believing the party line, particularly but not exclusively when it comes to ICANN.
I’ve genuinely written a 3,000-word article Devil’s-advocating in favor of the forthcoming .com price increases. I may or may not publish it.
I’ve come to realize in recent weeks that ICANN is not the soft and cuddly community I found in Brussels, and it probably deserves a much more critical eye than I’ve been providing lately.
So, faced with the existential crises of a 10-year anniversary, a critical reevaluation of your life choices, and accidentally putting a wholly fictional elderly woman in hospital, you’re faced with a stark choice: throw in your cards, or double-down.
I’m doubling down.
I was never a fan of the sunk-cost fallacy anyway.