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Salesforce.com pays over $1.5m for data.com

Kevin Murphy, June 7, 2011, Domain Sales

Salesforce.com has bought the domain name data.com for “an amount that significantly exceeds the $1.5 million reserve”, according to Oversee.net.
The domain had been due to be auctioned during the company’s DOMAINFest in Barcelona tomorrow, but was taken out of contention early with the private sale.
While Oversee did not disclose the buyer or final sales price, the Whois record already shows Salesforce.com as the new owner. It was previously owned by United Business Media.
Oversee said the deal brings its year-to-date sales to $11 million.

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ICANN hiring CSRs for new TLD program

Kevin Murphy, June 7, 2011, Domain Registries

ICANN has advertised for four new staff to support its new generic top-level domains program.
The organization is looking for three Lead Application Coordinators, to be based in Marina Del Rey, Hong Kong and Brussels, and one Application Coordinator for Marina Del Rey.
The roles are all fairly similar – essentially senior customer support representatives for new gTLD applicants. The lead positions require more than five years call center experience and a university degree.
With the number of applicants in the first round expected to be around the 400 mark, I think that’s a pretty solid ratio of CSRs to applicants, assuming the application process runs smoothly.
The hiring move is obviously a pretty strong indication that ICANN expects the new gTLD program to kick off fairly soon.
ICANN has also recently started advertising for a vice president of Europe, which I believe is a new position. It currently has 18 open positions in total, according to its hiring page.

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Senior ICANN staffer hired by .bank project

Kevin Murphy, June 7, 2011, Domain Registries

Craig Schwartz, ICANN’s chief gTLD registry liaison, has been headhunted by BITS, the tech arm of the Financial Services Roundtable, to head up its .bank top-level domain application.
Schwartz will become BITS’ general manager of registry programs in early July, following the conclusion of the next ICANN meeting in Singapore.
BITS has yet to reveal the TLDs it plans to apply for, but .bank is the no-brainer. I understand it is also considering complementary strings, such as .finance and .insurance
The organization has already said that it plans to use VeriSign as its back-end registry services provider.
Schwartz is a five-year ICANN veteran, and his experience dealing with registries will no doubt be missed, particularly at a time when the number of gTLDs is set to expand dramatically.
His replacement will have plenty of time to settle into the role, however. The first new gTLDs approved under the program are not likely to go live until late 2012 at the earliest.

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Final call for .xxx policy volunteers

Kevin Murphy, June 7, 2011, Domain Registries

The International Foundation For Online Responsibility, which will set policies for the .xxx top-level domain, has issued its final call for Policy Council volunteers.
The deadline for nominations for the nine PC seats has been set at July 5, and IFFOR plans to announce the successful candidates in late August.
Five of the seats are reserved for members of the porn industry. Another will represent privacy/security interests, one will be drawn from the world of child protection, and one will be a free speech advocate.
The final seat will be occupied by ICM Registry, the .xxx manager.
My understanding is that a front-runner for the child protection role is Sharon Girling, a former British police officer who played a key role in child abuse stings including Operation Ore.
I know of a few people who have applied for the free speech spot. Most recently, outspoken .xxx critic “DarkLady”, author of the Dot-XXX Opposition blog, revealed she had put herself forward for the job.
While the PC members are ostensibly volunteers, they do get a $15,000 annual stipend and their travel expenses paid for.
IFFOR will receive $10 from ICM for every .xxx domain that is registered.

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Feds seize conspiracy theorist’s domain

Kevin Murphy, June 7, 2011, Domain Policy

The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency has seized the domain name of an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist.
Update: This story is probably bogus.
The domain lowellsfacts.com has started resolving to the now-familiar ICE banner, warning visitors about the penalties for counterfeiting and copyright infringement.
Its name servers switched this week to ICE-owned seizedservers.com.
Judging from the Google cache, the site was devoted to spreading dangerous misinformation about the the efficacy of various vaccines, particularly Gardasil, which is used to prevent HPV infection.
Unlike previously seized domains, lowellsfacts.com does not, at least from the cache, appear to have been prominently pimping counterfeit goods.
It was registered using Go Daddy’s private registration service, but once belonged to one Lowell Hubbs.
You can listen to Hubbs’ theory about vaccines and the Rockerfellers on YouTube. He makes Jenny McCarthy look sensible. He was apparently a regular Huffington Post commenter.
A blog devoted to criticizing Hubbs and his theories can be found at lowellhubbs.blogspot.com and the reply to that blog, purportedly written by Hubbs, can be found, confusingly, at costnermatthews.blogspot.com.
The Hubbs’ blog claims the seized site had been hacked and filled with illegal porn links. His critic’s blog says he was likely shut down for using copyrighted material without permission.

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Domain seizures can’t stop online drug pushers

Kevin Murphy, June 6, 2011, Domain Policy

Two US senators have reportedly asked the Drug Enforcement Agency to seize the domain name of Silk Road, a web site that lets drug users buy heroin and other narcotics online.
There’s just one problem: the site doesn’t have a domain name.
Silk Road is reportedly a bit like eBay, but for illegal drugs. You can buy ecstasy, marijuana, heroin and so forth, from actual dealers, using the peer-to-peer virtual currency Bitcoins.
This weekend, Sen. Charles Schumer and Sen. Joe Manchin wrote to the DEA to demand that the site’s domain name be seized, an increasingly popular tactic in law enforcement.
But Silk Road’s address is apparently ianxz6zefk72ulzz.onion, which is only accessible through the mostly anonymous TOR onion-routing P2P network.
As far as I can make out, there is no registry for .onion addresses – they’re cryptographic hashes of private keys known only to the registrant, which ensures almost-uniqueness without the need for a central repository.
In other words, seizing the domain is going to be impossible.

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Overstock becomes .co’s anchor tenant from heaven

Kevin Murphy, June 6, 2011, Domain Registries

Overstock.com is to slap its new brand, O.co, on the Oakland Raiders stadium in California, bringing yet more exposure to the .co top-level domain.
The company bought the stadium naming rights back in April, and was pushed into the rebranding now because the sign needs to go up, according to AdAge.
Presumably, whenever American football fans tune into a broadcast or read the sports pages, they’re now going to be exposed to the .co brand.
Not many TLDs have that claim to fame. According to Wikipedia, the only other stadium in the US currently named after a domain is the Jobing.com Arena in Glendale, Arizona.
Overstock has been so good for .CO Internet’s marketing, it’s easy to forget that the company actually paid for the domain, splashing out $350,000 a year ago.
I’d hazard a guess that if the registry had known just how prolific the O.co brand would become, it would have given the name away for free.
Currently, the domain o.co redirects to overstock.com, but the site logo refers to “O.co, also known as Overstock.com”.

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Elephant hunt clip is Video.me’s biggest hit

Kevin Murphy, June 3, 2011, Domain Registrars

Go Daddy’s Video.me turned a year old this week and it looks like its biggest success story to date is the video of CEO Bob Parsons shooting an elephant while on vacation in Zimbabwe.
The “Hunting Problem Elephant” clip has been viewed 768,541 times since it was uploaded at the end of March, making it the site’s most-viewed by a considerable margin.
The second most-popular video, with 49,293 views, was uploaded by racing driver Dale Earnhardt Jr, one of Go Daddy’s spokesmodels.
Only five clips have received more than 10,000 views, judging from the front page of the site.
Alexa Video.meHere’s a screen-grab of Alexa’s user reach graph for Video.me.
The spike corresponds to the elephant incident, which was widely reported online and on TV in the US, but traffic seems to have returned to pre-shooting levels rather quickly afterward.
One of Video.me’s selling points when it launched was the ability to privately share videos, so I guess it’s possible that there’s a thriving community hidden in the site somewhere.

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ICANN tries to limit rogue registrars

Kevin Murphy, June 3, 2011, Domain Registrars

As part of its growing efforts to clean up the domain name registrar market, ICANN has introduced background checks for companies applying for accreditation.
ICANN will check criminal and financial records, as well as doing credit checks, on companies that want to be able to sell domains in gTLDs.
As a result, the cost of applying to become a registrar is going up by $1,000, to $3,500, to cover the cost of accessing the relevant third-party databases.
The changes, made largely at the behest of law enforcement participants in ICANN, concerned that some registrars are not what you’d call responsible netizens, come into effect July 1.
The intellectual property lobby had called for the checks to include cybersquatting and UDRP judgements, but those suggestions were not taken on board.

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A million .co domains registered

Kevin Murphy, June 2, 2011, Domain Registries

At some point over the last few weeks the one millionth .co domain was registered, approximately ten months after the domain names became generally available.
That’s pretty good going (better than I expected) when compared to other large-scale TLD launches, such as .mobi, which took almost five years to hit the same milestone.
Registry .CO Internet has been marketing .co domains hard for the last 12 months, particularly in California, where it is focused on attracting Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.
To turn the one million milestone into a marketing event, the company has also released some customer endorsement videos at a new site, UnderTheBulb.co (which it’s advertising in my sidebar).
Whether the rapid growth is sustainable is now the question. The one-year anniversary of .co’s launch is coming up in late July, and we might expect a number of early speculative registrations to expire.
But .CO Internet seems confident that it won’t see much of a blip, as its numbers suggest that the vast majority of its registrants – reportedly north of 80% – own fewer than 10 domains each.
Chief executive Juan Calle joked that the company had considered a marketing campaign to coincide with the anniversary, with the slogan “Let ‘Em Drop”, to use a bit of reverse psychology on domainers.
“The registry growing fairly fast,” said Calle. “What happens is that if those domains get dropped they’ll get picked up by real users and businesses.”
The rapid growth is no doubt due in no small part to Go Daddy, which has been prominently featuring .co domains on its front page for months, and to promotional pricing.
Under the current promotion, .CO Internet has roughly halved its registry fee to about $9.50 for first-year registrations, which has translated into $11.99 domains at the checkout.
But Calle said the higher price of .co domains, usually around the $30 mark, does not deter its target customer base, which are business users rather than speculators.
“Pricing is secondary to marketing when it comes to the growth rate — when we do things like the Super Bowl, or when Overstock [which rebranded as o.co] runs their commercials for a week nationally,” he said.

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