Demand Media in rumored IPO

Demand Media, which owns number-two domain registrar eNom, could file to go public this summer, the Financial Times has reported.
Widely thought of as a “content mill”, Demand is in the business of mining search and domain data and pumping out content which it can sell ads against.
The FT, using anonymous sources, reports that an IPO, which could happen by November, would value the firm at $1.5 billion. Revenue is estimated to be around $250 million a year.
While selling domain names does not appear to be Demand’s core business, other domain name registrars have a rocky record when it comes to public listings.
Register.com, which used its early-mover advantage to IPO at the tail end of the dot-com boom, ended up going private after low-cost registrars like Go Daddy started eating its lunch.
Go Daddy itself gave the world a glimpse at its finances when it filed its S-1 back in 2006, but CEO Bob Parsons yanked the IPO at the eleventh hour, citing poor market conditions and his inability to keep his mouth shut during the traditional pre-offering Quiet Period.
Parsons said at the time that it’s hard to show a profit under GAAP as a growing registrar, due to the way registrations are accounted for.
Tucows, meanwhile, has managed to tick along quietly with a listing on the small-cap markets for years.

Comment Tagged: bob parsons, demand media, enom, go daddy, ipo, register.com

Porn group starts anti-XXX campaign

Now that the Christians appear to have quietened down, the adult entertainment industry has unleashed its own letter-writing campaign aimed at crippling ICM Registry’s bid for the .xxx TLD.
The Free Speech Coalition has started urging its members to lobby ICANN with emails demanding that the .xxx proposal is rejected.
The front page of its web site started carrying the call to action earlier today, already resulting in over a dozen form complaints.
The anti-porn complaints that have flooded ICANN’s forums for the last week focussed largely on the alleged harmful effects of porn, and will probably be politely ignored.
But unlike the Christians, the FSC has read the background documents – which request comments on how ICANN should process ICM’s application – and its letters are therefore on-topic
They urge ICANN to “Adopt Option #3” by agreeing with the dissenting minority view of the Independent Review Panel that recently ruled ICANN was unfair to reject ICM back in 2007.
“Regardless of the option chosen, I ask that ICANN continue to consider the widespread opposition of the sponsored community in any further decisions concerning a .XXX sTLD,” the letters add.
The campaign is not unexpected, but it won’t make ICANN’s board of directors’ decision any easier. After all, .xxx is ostensibly a “sponsored” TLD, and a significant voice within its potential customer base does not appear to want it.
There may also be other power games at play.
ICM president Stuart Lawley claimed during his IRP cross-examination in September that the FSC had offered to support ICM in 2003, but only if it could control the sponsoring organization and collect the associated $10 per domain per year.
The ICANN comment period runs until May 10. The FSC’s own comments, from boss Diane Duke, are here.

6 Comments Tagged: free speech coalition, ICANN, icm registry, new gTLDs, new TLDs, xxx

TLDH sells off domain portfolio, waits for new TLDs

Top Level Domain Holdings has reported blah revenue for its fiscal 2009, as it reorganized itself in preparation for ICANN’s forthcoming new gTLD round.
The company, which owns registry services firm Minds + Machines and has interests in dotNYC and DotEco, is listed on London’s low-cap AIM market.
It today reported revenue for the 12 months to October 31, 2009 of £315,000 ($487,000), up from £232,000 ($358,000) a year earlier, with an operating loss of £1.4 million, ($2.2 million) down from £1.5 million ($2.3 million).
TLDH also revealed that it sold off its entire parked domain name portfolio for $250,000 last November, after the end of its financial year, after it found parking revenue on the decline:

The Company’s domain name portfolio comprising mainly German and other European parked domain names that receive direct navigation and search traffic which can be monetized through search links to generate click-through advertising revenues generated a lower revenue in the period and were subsequently sold following the period end for US$250,000 in cash.

TLDH recorded an impairment charge of £154,000 ($238,000) for this transaction, suggesting the company sold its portfolio for approximately half of its previously reported paper value.
The firm says its strategy is “to build a portfolio of gTLD applicants and infrastructure technologies”, and believes ICANN’s recent Nairobi meeting decisions continued “a trend of increasing the barriers to application for non-experts”.
TLDH still looks like it has more than enough cash on hand to see it through to when ICANN begins officially accepting new TLD applications, barring further delays, with £4.3 million ($6.6 million) in the bank at the end of October.

1 Comment Tagged: .eco, .nyc, doteco, dotnyc, Minds + Machines, newgTLDs, newTLDs, tldh, top level domain holdings

ICANN publishes Whois reform wish-list

ICANN’s latest stab at reforming Whois could lead to lots of useful new features, from more comprehensive search to more uniform privacy services.
The organization has released a staff report, “Inventory of WHOIS Service Requirements”, outlining 12 technical areas where Whois could be improved.
If the ideas were implemented, Whois records could one day contain your Twitter address or instant messaging screen name, as well as the current set of data.
The proposals could also lead to registrant search features in Whois as standard, allowing users to pull up a list of all the domains registered by any given individual.
That kind of service is only currently available at a premium price from the likes of DomainTools. The ICANN proposals could bake it into the spec.
The new paper, apparently released yesterday, was designed to outline technical requirements that might be needed to support future policies on Whois.
So while it’s not policy, it’s a good indicator of where ICANN thinks policy may head.
It concludes with a list of 12 “possible requirements” for the GNSO and other stakeholders to consider over the next couple of months before the Brussels meeting.
Here are the highlights: …continue reading

4 Comments Tagged: ICANN, steve sheng, twitter, verisign, whois

WordPress founder criticizes NSI’s security

WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg had a few harsh words for top-five domain registrar Network Solutions today, after a whole bunch of NSI-hosted blogs were hacked over the weekend.
It appears that NSI’s web hosting operation, which includes a one-click WordPress installation service, was failing to adequately secure database passwords on shared servers.
Or, as Mullenweg blogged: “A web host had a crappy server configuration that allowed people on the same box to read each others’ configuration files.”
WordPress, by necessity, stores its database passwords as plaintext in a script called wp-config.php, which is supposed to be readable only by the web server.
If the contents of that file are viewable by others, a malicious user could inject whatever content they like into the database – anything from correcting a typo in a blog post to deleting the entire site.
That appears to be what happened here: for some reason, the config files of WordPress blogs hosted at NSI gave read permissions to unauthorized people.
The cracker(s) who noticed this vulnerability chose to inject an HTML IFrame into the URL field of the WordPress database. This meant visitors to affected blogs were bounced to a malware site.
Mullenweg is evidently pissed that some news reports characterized the incident as a WordPress vulnerability, rather than an NSI vulnerability.
NSI appears to have corrected the problem, resetting its users’ database passwords as a precaution. Anybody making database calls in custom PHP, outside of the wp-config.php file, is going to have to go into their code to update their passwords manually.

3 Comments Tagged: hosting, matt mullenweg, network solutions, nsi, security, wordpress

WIPO’s UDRP market share lead narrows

The number of UDRP cases filed with the National Arbitration Forum dipped slightly last year, according to NAF numbers released today.
The organization said it received 1,759 filings last year, compared to 1,770 in 2008. Only 1,333 of the cases were actually heard; the others were dropped or settled.
While that’s a decline for NAF, it’s not quite as steep as the almost 10% drop experienced by rival arbitrator WIPO over the same period.
That said, WIPO is still the primary choice of companies trying to enforce their trademarks in the domain name system, saying last month that it received 2,107 complaints in 2009.
It was also the year of big multi-domain cases for both outfits.
WIPO handed 1,542 domains to Inter-Continental Hotels in a single case, while NAF transferred a relatively modest 1,017 domains to ConsumerInfo.com.

Comment Tagged: cybersquatting, naf, udrp, wipo

.xxx jumps on social media bandwagon

ICM Registry, the firm behind the proposed .xxx TLD, has belatedly joined the social media revolution, setting up a Facebook fan page and a Twitter account to expound the benefits of pornographic domain names.
I’d hazard a guess that this is in response to the deluge of negative opinion currently directed at it in ICANN’s public comment forum.
If you can wade through the Christian spam there, you’ll find only a handful of people backing ICM.
Some of these comments come from policy wonks, urging ICANN to show it can be as accountable as it says it is.
Others come from random individuals, suspiciously based in ICM’s home state of Florida.
If this woman, for example, is not British ICM president Stuart Lawley’s green card lawyer, I’ll eat my beanie.
Hat tip: @mneylon

1 Comment Tagged: ICANN, icm registry, xxx

Politics at play in DNS CERT debate

ICANN chief Rod Beckstrom may have shot himself in the foot when he claimed at the Nairobi meeting that the domain name system is “under attack” and “could stop at any given point in time”.
Beckstrom wants ICANN to create a new CERT, Computer Emergency Response Team, to coordinate DNS security, but he’s now seeing objections from country-code domain managers, apparently connected to his remarks last month.
Chris Disspain of auDA, Australia’s .au registry, has just filed comments on behalf of the ccNSO council, which he chairs, saying it’s not clear whether there’s any need for a DNS CERT, and that ICANN is moving too fast to create one.
It’s pretty clear from the ccNSO statement that Hot Rod’s fairly blunt remarks at the GAC meeting in Nairobi, which I transcribed in full here, have influenced the ccNSO’s thinking on the matter:

the comments of ICANN’s CEO and President, Rod Beckstrom, to governmental representatives in Nairobi, have the potential to undermine the productive relationships established under ICANN’s multi-stakeholder model, cause damage to the effective relationships that many ccTLD operators have developed with their national administrations and discounted the huge efforts of many in the ICANN and broader security community to ensure the ongoing security and stability of the Internet

Disspain had already strongly written to Beckstrom, during the ICANN meeting, calling his comments “inflammatory” and reiterating some of the points made in the latest ccNSO filing.
Beckstrom’s response to Disspain’s first letter is here. I would characterize it as a defense of his position.
It seems pretty crazy that something as important as the DNS has no official security coordination body but, as Disspain points out, there are already some organizations attempting to tackle the role.
DNS-OARC, for example, was set up to fulfill the functions of a DNS CERT. However, as founder Paul Vixie confessed, it has so far failed to do so. Vixie thinks energies would be better spent fixing DNS-OARC, rather than creating a new body.
ICANN’s comments period on its DNS CERT business case is open for another couple of days. It’s so far attracted only a handful of comments, mostly skeptical, mostly filed by ccTLD operators and mostly suggesting that other organizations could handle the task better.
If Beckstrom’s aim in Nairobi was to reignite the debate and Get Stuff Done by scaring stakeholders into action, he may find he’s been successful.
However, if his aim was to place ICANN at the center of the new security initiative, he may ultimately live to regret his remarks.
Either way, I expect DNS security will eventually improve as a result.

Comment Tagged: auda, ccnso, cctlds, chris disspain, dns cert, dns oarc, ICANN, paul vixie, rod beckstrom

.jobs aiming to become a gTLD by the back door?

Employ Media, the company behind the sponsored TLD .jobs, looks like it’s making a play to become a significantly more open gTLD.
The company has proposed a substantial relaxation of its registration policies, based on what may be a loophole in its ICANN registry contract.
Currently, the .jobs namespace is one of the most restrictive TLDs. Only company names can be registered, and registrants have to be approved HR professionals at those companies.
As you might imagine, it’s been phenomenally unsuccessful from a business point of view, with only about 15,000 domains registered since it went live five years ago.
Employ Media now wants to be able to register “non-companyname” domains, and is to apply to its sponsorship body, the Society for Human Resource Management, for permission.
At least, that’s what it looks like. The documents posted over at policy.jobs are pretty opaque.
Indeed, as ERE.net points out, the “proposed amendment” to its charter reads more like a claim that no amendment is required.
The company appears to be pursuing a business model whereby it could auction off …continue reading

3 Comments Tagged: .jobs, directemployer, employ media, ICANN, new gTLDs, society for human resource management, sTLDs

Richard Dawkins files UDRP claim for richarddawkins.com?

Biologist Richard Dawkins, perhaps the planet’s most famous and controversial atheist, has apparently filed a UDRP claim for richarddawkins.com.
The domain, which is down, is registered to a New Jersey address. For the last 10 years, up until at least a week ago, it has sold Dawkins’ books via Amazon’s affiliate program.
The UDRP case was filed with the National Arbitration Forum yesterday. The parties to the case are not yet listed.
Dawkins’ official web site is hosted at richarddawkins.net.
Interestingly, richarddawkins.org is owned by the loopy creationist group Access Research Network. ARN’s page incorrectly points visitors to richarddawkins.com if they want the “official” site.
Dawkins may have a struggle on his hands. Celebrity cybersquatting cases are rarely straightforward, and he may have trouble proving both trademark rights and bad faith.
Better knock on wood, Richard.

1 Comment Tagged: access research network, cybersquatting, national arbitration forum, richard dawkins, udrp