Massive firewall vendor lets domain expire

Check Point Software, one of the world’s leading firewall vendors, forgot to renew its main domain name and it wound up parked by its registrar over the weekend.
The domain checkpoint.com had an expiry date of March 30.
According a screenshot over on The Register, it was resolving to a Network Solutions placeholder page until this afternoon.
The Whois record at DomainTools still shows NetSol’s pending renewal or deletion details, but the domain – a 1994 registration – appears to be resolving normally now.
The company has a market cap of $13.37 billion.

Post your job opening on DI for $1 a day

I’d like to introduce a new jobs feature for DomainIncite readers.
As you’ll be able to see in the sidebar to the left, and in the header above, DI Jobs is now live on the site.
If you’re in the domain name industry you probably already know that most of your colleagues and competitors read DI, so I think this might be a great way for you to find new talent.
I’m using SimplyHired, a third-party service, for the listings. The jobs you can see right now — which may vary based on your IP address — are likely to be what it calls “backfill”.
It’s a bit like Google Adsense, and I’ve been made aware that one or two of the listings might therefore appear to be a bit distasteful to begin with (Whois email address scraping? Really?) but these will be bumped from view once a small number of DI reader jobs are posted.
For now, the top five most recently posted jobs will be listed in the sidebar, and the rest will be accessible via jobs.domainincite.com.
The introductory price for a listing is $90 for 90 days, just a buck a day.

Big Content issues gTLD lock-down demands

Twenty members of the movie, music and games businesses have asked ICANN to impose strict anti-piracy rules on new top-level domains related to their industries.
In a position statement, “New gTLDs Targeting Creative Sectors: Enhanced Safeguards”, the groups say that such gTLDs are “fraught with serious risks” and should be controlled more rigorously than other gTLDs.
“If new gTLDs targeted to these sectors – e.g., .music, .movies, .games – are launched without adequate safeguards, they could become havens for continued and increased criminal and illegal activity,” the statement says.
It goes on to make seven demands for regulations covering Whois accuracy, enforced anti-piracy policies, and private requests for domain name take-downs.
The group also says that the content industries should be guaranteed “a seat at the table” when these new gTLD registries make their policies.
The statement is directed to ICANN, but it also appears to address the Governmental Advisory Committee, which has powers to object to new gTLD applications:

In evaluating applications for such content-focused gTLDs, ICANN must require registry operators (and the registrars with whom they contract) to implement enhanced safeguards to reduce these serious risks, while maximizing the potential benefits of such new domains.
Governments should use similar criteria in the exercise of their capability to issue Early Warnings, under the ICANN-approved process, with regard to new gTLD applications that are problematic from a public policy or security perspective.

The statement was sent to ICANN by the Coalition for Online Accountability, which counts the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, the Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry Association of America and Disney among its members.
It was separately signed by the many of the same groups that are supporting Far Further’s .music application, including the American Association for Independent Music and the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry.

Directi emerges as new gTLD applicant

The India-based domain name registrar Directi plans to apply for a bunch of new generic top-level domains, using ARI Registry Services as its back-end registry provider.
Directi has set up a new entity, Radix, to handle its applications and registry business.
The number and nature of the gTLDs in Radix’s plans have not been revealed, but the company uses words like “entrepreneurial” and “ambitious” to describe the move.
Reading between the lines, I’m going to lump Radix in with the like of Minds+Machines, Donuts, and Demand Media as one of the few companies to reveal big multiple-gTLD investment plans.
These “domainer” applicants (as opposed to focused, single-string applicants) are the guys to watch post-May 1, when the list of applications is published by ICANN.
In addition to Radix, Directi owns ResellerClub, LogicBoxes, BigRock and WebHosting.info.
According to Whois, radix.com belongs to a Brazilian investment company. It does not currently resolve.
Assuming there’s no affiliation with Directi, I think this officially means that Andrew Allemann is no longer allowed to mock companies that launch services before they own the matching .com domain.

DomainTools.co sells for $2,500

Somebody has just paid out $2,500 for the domain name domaintools.co, according to Sedo.
I guess not even the most savvy domain name industry companies are immune to typosquatting.
Given that the price is just below what you might expect to pay for a cheap UDRP complaint, but more than the domain is probably worth alone, I assume the buyer is DomainTools itself.
According to DomainTools (the historical Whois service, not the company), domaintools.co has been in the hands of a Chinese registrant since .co went live in July 2010.
The domain, which is parked, is currently in escrow.

Rogue registrar suspended over “stolen” domain

ICANN has told Turkish domain name registrar Alantron that its accreditation will be suspended for a month due to its shoddy record-keeping.
The suspension, which will become effective March 8, follows an investigation into allegations of double-selling.
ICANN issued the suspension last Thursday after trying unsuccessfully for almost three months to get its hands on Alantron’s registration records.
The company now has until March 28 to sort out its compliance problems or face losing its accreditation entirely.
I understand the investigation was prompted by complaints filed by an American named Roger Rainwater over the potentially valuable domain name pricewire.com.
Pricewire.com spent a couple of years under Whois privacy but was grabbed last August by Turkish registrant Altan Tanriverdi, according to historical Whois records.
Rainwater, who says he had been monitoring it for three or four years, subsequently paid Tanriverdi an undisclosed sum for the domain, signing up for an Alantron account so it could be pushed.
Rainwater showed up in the Whois for pricewire.com on September 7 last year. But he says he was unable to change his name servers and 48 hours later the name disappeared from his account.
He says he was told by Alantron that it had put the domain in Tanriverdi’s account “by mistake” and that it was sold to SnapNames as part of a batch of dropping domains.
According to emails sent to Rainwater, seen by DI, Alantron said that pricewire.com was “registered via a partner company called Directi for a company called Snapnames”.
SnapNames had already auctioned the name – apparently there were more than 40 bidders – and the name has since been transferred to one Sammy Katz of Philadelphia.
However, given that Whois reliability is at question here, it’s not entirely clear who owns it. It’s currently parked at InternetTraffic.com.
Tanriverdi, who appears to be equally aggrieved, has published an extensive history of the dispute, along with screenshots, here (in Turkish).
In short: Alantron stands accused of double-selling pricewire.com.
ICANN’s compliance team has been unable to get its hands on the underlying transaction data despite repeated attempts because Alantron apparently doesn’t have it.
Its suspension notice alleges that Alantron was running two registration systems in parallel and that they weren’t talking to each other, resulting in the same name being sold to two parties.
Read ICANN’s suspension notice in PDF format here.

CentralNic working with .mls new gTLD bidder

MLS Domains has contracted with CentralNic to provide the back-end registry for its .mls new top-level domain application, which it expects to be contested.
MLS in this context stands for Multiple Listing Service, a form of real estate listing aggregation service common in the US.
MLS Domains is already selling .mls preregistrations, at $800 a pop, to qualifying MLS companies, which will partially fund its application.
Company president Bob Bemis said in a press release that CentralNic was selected due to its experience with “novel TLDs”:

we expect no more than two or three thousand second-level domains ever to be registered on .MLS, so we need a registry partner who can provide a high level of service for a relatively small market of customers.

CentralNic sells sub-domains in alternative suffixes such as uk.com, gb.com and us.org. It manages these domains as if they were regular gTLDs, offering a Whois service, UDRP, etc.
The registry will also provide an integrated, affiliated registrar for the .mls project, MLS Domains said.
That’s if the company’s application is successful, of course.
.mls is expected to be contested by the Chinese owner of mls.com – Nanning Billin Network Ltd has applied for a US trademark on the gTLD.

Thick .com Whois policy delayed

ICANN’s GNSO Council has deferred a decision on whether Verisign should have to thicken up the Whois database for .com and its other gTLDs.
A motion to begin an official Policy Development Process on thick Whois was kicked down the road by councilors this afternoon at the request of the Non-Commercial Users Constituency.
It will now be discussed at the Council’s face-to-face meeting in Costa Rica in March. But there were also calls from registries to delay a decision for up to a year, calling the PDP a “distraction”.
Verisign’s .com registry contract and the standard Registrar Accreditation Agreement are currently being renegotiated by ICANN, both of which could address Whois in some way.
Today, all contracted gTLD registries have to operate a thick Whois, except Verisign with its .com, .net, .jobs, etc, where the registrars manage the bulk of the Whois data.

First .xxx cybersquatting complaint filed by porn site

The new .xxx top-level domain has seen its first cybersquatting complaint filed by a porn site.
The registrant of the domain femjoy.xxx was hit by a UDRP complaint in with the World Intellectual Property Organization late last week.
FemJoy.com is a well-known “artistic nude” porn site, according to the adult industry trade press.
While there have already been 12 UDRP cases filed against .xxx registrants, the previous cases have all been filed by the owners, such as banks and retailers, of non-porn trademarks.
The femjoy.xxx case appears to be the first instance of a cybersquatting complaint filed by a porn site.
Complainant Georg Streit has owned a US trademark on “FemJoy” – covering “magazines and periodicals featuring photographs and images of landscapes and human bodies” – since 2007.
The registrant of femjoy.xxx is an Australian called Tu Nguyen, according to Whois records. The domain does not currently resolve. In fact, it doesn’t even have name servers.

Parked domain pun wins “Funniest Joke” award

A bit of Friday afternoon nonsense for you…
British stand-up comedian Tim Vine this week won a LAFTA award for the “year’s funniest joke” that’s basically just a pun on a domain name.
This is the joke: “Conjunctivitis.com – that’s a site for sore eyes”
The domain is parked (of course) and seems to be owned by a Californian domainer listed in Whois as the Health Hero Network.
I’m guessing the domain is seeing a traffic spike today.
Here’s a video of Tim Vine being much, much funnier.