Well it was bound to happen. We have been talking about this issue for months. Tucows.com has been building up a portfolio of hundreds of thousands of domains by taking ownership of expired domains of its customers instead of letting them drop or sending them to a public auction like, well, almost every other registrar in the world (there are over 900 registrars). Tucows announced today … [Read more...]

Representative Joe Barton, a Republican from Texas, asked the Justice Department on Tuesday to "thoroughly investigate" antitrust and privacy issues in a search advertising partnership planned by Google and Yahoo. Barton expressed frustration at Yahoo's response to questions, he and his staff posed about the deal, saying they "seemed designed to obscure rather than clarify how the Google-Yahoo … [Read more...]

Last week at the ICANN meeting in Cairo, a rule book for the new extensions, hundreds or maybe thousands of them was published. I wanted to take a few days to read through and I can now summarize these rules as follows: Application fee with be $185,000. In addition, applicants must pay registrar fees and the costs of addressing potential objections. The application fee also does not … [Read more...]

One of the world's biggest advertising and media services organizations, Publicis, in reported relatively strong third quarter results this morning signaled concern over the weakening global economy and the effect that it will have on advertising. Publicis indicated that digital media will remain the sweet spot. "Our digital businesses and our investments in high growth economies are … [Read more...]

As we all know, VeriSign has reported growth in each of the last many years for the number of .com registrations. My thoughts is that 2009 may mark the first year in a net loss of .com and .net domain registrations. In 2008 Verisign reported that at the end of the second quarter there were 87.3 million registration representing a 20% increase over the previous year.  However "new" … [Read more...]

On its blog today, Practicalecommerce.com, a site for well, ecommerce developers and sites, discusses how valuable a domain name is to site development. The blog correctly states that """"Your domain name is the most powerful piece of branding your store has on the Web"""" """"A strong, recognizable domain name for your business can bring even more organic traffic to your site. A poor … [Read more...]

As we reported about 10 days ago a online gambling group called for a boycott of all things Kentucky. A fellow domainer, Jeffrey Reynolds, Ph.D, started a website BoycottKentucky.com, where is now asking for people to sign the online petition. We just finished signing and suggest you take a minute out of your day and express your outrage with the Governor of Kentucky, Steve Beshear action, … [Read more...]