Domain Name News: December 19 Week in Review

Every Friday, DomainSherpa.com provides you with hand-curated, no-B.S., important domain name industry news that is hand-picked for you.

.Club Raising More Money, Valued at $25.4 Million – 18-Dec-14
.Club to be valued at $25.4 million after investment. The .Club top level domain name registry is raising more funds, and the latest round will value the company at $25.4 million after the investment closes. .Club previously raised $7.5 million, with about $3.5 million of that in debt. The company is conducting two additional fundraising…
Union Bank Loses Cases Against Gripe Websites – 18-Dec-14
Former customer registered ten domain names to air grievances about the bank. Union Bank has lost three domain name arbitration cases involving an upset former customer. The bank filed three separate actions covering UnionBank.me, unionbancal.co, unionbank.cc, union-bank.co, mufgunionbankna.com, unionbancalcorp.com, unionbancal.net, unionbancal.org, unionbankna.com and unionbanks.net. The domain names were all registered by William Bookout. At one…
Greece Gets Its 1st ICANN Accredited Registrar: Papaki.gr – 18-Dec-14
The first Greek ICANN accredited registrar finally arrived. I have been waiting for many years for a registrar located in Greece and it finally happened. Papaki.gr has signed the Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA) 2013 and is listed at the ICANN…
.Baby and .MLS Fetch Over $3 Million Each – 18-Dec-14
ICANN and Power Auctions have completed December’s mini-batch of “last resort” new gTLD auctions, adding a total of $6.4 million to its mysterious auction cash pile. Johnson & Johnson won .baby, fighting off five portfolio applicants and paying a winning bid of $3,088,888. Meanwhile, the Canadian Real Estate Association beat Afilias to .mls, paying $3,359,000…
Most New gTLDs Use Namesentry After Famous Four Signs With Architelos – 18-Dec-14
Architelos yesterday announced that Famous Four Media has signed up to use its NameSentry security service across its portfolio of new gTLDs. The company said that it now has 60% of launched new gTLDs on the platform, which gives registries a way to view potentially abusive domain names and automate remediation. That’s over 250 TLDs…
Human Glitch Lets Hackers Into ICANN – 17-Dec-14
It’s 2014. Does anyone in the domain name business still fall for phishing attacks? Apparently, yes, ICANN staff do. ICANN has revealed that “several” staff members fell prey to a spear-phishing attack last month, resulting in the theft of potentially hundreds of user credentials and unauthorized access to at least one Governmental Advisory Committee web…
GoDaddy Sued for $50 Million By Russian Millionaire Konstantin Malofeev – 17-Dec-14
According to Courthousenews.com, GoDaddy.com has been sued for $50 million by A Russian millionaire claiming Godaddy defamed him by hosting a number of websites that accuse him of fraud. Konstantin Malofeev sued GoDaddy, Domains by Proxy and John Doe – the anonymous operator of the websites – on Dec. 14 Malofeev claims he is a…
.Website Collision Domains Give a Boost in Registrations: Here are Available Lll/Nnn/One Word Domains – 17-Dec-14
.Website which had its ICANN collision lists freed up recently has seen a nice bounce in daily registrations. Like a bunch of other TLDs, the spike in registrations appears to have come on the back of Black Friday and Cyber Monday registrations. The TLD saw volumes of 5 times that of the previous day’s registrations…
Escrow.com Golf Tourney with Matching Funds from Go Daddy & the Parsons Foundation Raises $380,000 for Wounded Veterans – 16-Dec-14
For the past three years Escrow.com and Hanna’s Restaurant has staged an annual golf tournament in Southern California to raise money for the Semper Fi Fund and America’s Fund. These funds provide immediate financial assistance and lifetime support to post 9/11 wounded, critically ill and injured members of all branches of the U.S. Armed Forces and their families, ensuring that they have the resources they need during their recovery and transition back to their communities.
NamesCon Acquires DomainFest & Will Be Part of Namescon 2015 Las Vegas – 16-Dec-14
Well our hunch was right yesterday, as today NamesCon announced they have acquired DomainFest from Oversee.net in a press release we just received. “Starting with small conferences in LA and Barcelona, Oversee grew Domainfest into a large, global conference series, attracting domainers, marketing professionals and celebrity speakers from all over the world.” “We are very…
Brown Shoe Co. Sells Shoes.com Business – 16-Dec-14
Owners of SHOEme and OnlineShoes.com buy Shoes.com. Publicly traded Brown Shoe Co has sold its Shoes.com online business to online shoe-seller SHOEme. SHOEme operates Shoeme.ca/com and OnlineShoes.com. Hardy Capital acquired both of these companies earlier this year. In an interview with Business in Vancouver, SHOEme CEO Roger Hardy said “Predominantly, we’re acquiring the assets. That’s…
.XYZ Registry Manipulates Alexa Rankings & Makes New gTLD Registries Angry – 16-Dec-14
.XYZ is an embarrassment to the domaining industry and specifically to the New gTLDs. We all know this, yet some choose to ignore the facts and still quote all the .XYZ registration number lies while others have attacked it. I found…
Hotly Contested gTLDs (.Baby and .MLS) Up for Auction Tomorrow – 16-Dec-14
ICANN’s fifth set of last-resort new gTLD auctions is set for tomorrow and it’s another small batch. Just two contention sets — .baby and .mls — are set to be resolved, with ICANN stashing the winning bids into its special fund. .baby is hotly contested with no fewer than six applicants — five portfolio applicants…
CompareNow.com Buys Compare.com Domain Name – 16-Dec-14
Auto insurance comparison site upgrades its domain name. Auto insurance comparison company CompareNow.com has purchased the domain name Compare.com, according to Whois records. CompareNow.com was founded by Andrew Rose, previously the chairman and CEO of Elephant Auto Insurance. If that name sounds familiar, it might be because the company unsuccessfully tried to get the domain…
As .Trust Opens for Sunrise, Artemis Dumps .Secure Bid – 16-Dec-14
Amazon is now the proud owner of the .secure new gTLD, after much smaller competing applicant Artemis Internet withdrew its bid. Coincidentally, the settlement of the contention set came just yesterday, the day before Artemis took its .trust — which I’ve described as a “backup plan” — to sunrise. I assume .secure was settled with…
.NYC Report: 3% of Registrants Own 37% of .NYC Domains, 36 Registrants Own 8,688 Domains (14%) – 15-Dec-14
This is a follow up to my 1st .NYC report because now .nyc zone is more representative and reflects the true registration patterns of people of New York. There were 13,669 registrants that only bought a single domain. Also 3%…
ICANN Denies Allegation That New gTLD Have Widespread Phishing & Malware Sites – 15-Dec-14
According to a company blog post out today, by brand protection company CSC, citing Amy Mushahwar, counsel and Chief Information Security Officer at Washington, D.C. law firm ZwillGen PLLC, says: “New domains (new gTLD’s) are being registered as phishing sites and for drive-by downloads of malware.” “Nefarious uses have been very widespread. It’s incumbent upon…
One Degree World Will Launch More Than 1,300 Travel Websites On New gTLD Domain Names – 15-Dec-14
One Degree World plans to launch more than 1,300 new travel related websites on New gTLD domain names. A few days back I wrote how global travel and entertainment company One Degree World launched their first 8 travel websites on…
UDRP Panel Gives Easygroup Rights to The Word “Easy”? Awards Domain It Let Expire in 2009 – 15-Dec-14
A one member UDRP panel, of William R. Towns seemingly granted EasyGroup Limited of London, the right to all domain names that start with the word “easy” that the company has or will trademark in the future. EasyGroup is the owner of a Community trademark (“CTM”) for EASYTRAIN in connection with transportation services, which is…
.Club Supports WordPress Sites at Wordcamp Orlando – 12-Dec-14
The .Club registry team traveled to Orlando last week to attend one of the biggest WordPress events in Florida, WordCamp Orlando. “As you probably know, WordPress is an amazingly powerful software platform for creating a great website without necessarily having to…
Best Reverse Domain Hijacking UDRP Ever: Asia Charts of Singapore Guilty, First for Asian UDRP Provider – 12-Dec-14
The Asian Domain Name Dispute Resolution Centre (Kuala Lumpur Office) has returned what we believe is that providers first Reverse Domain Name Hijacking ruling on the domain name AsiaCharts.com, and its on the exact type of case that we have been complaining about, one in which the complainant did not have a trademark. Even worse…
New Poll Says 25% Think Organic Co. Should Have .Organic Domain: But Only 396 Have Been Registered – 11-Dec-14
.ORGANIC domain operator Afilias today announced the results of a poll in which “nearly 70% of respondents believe that some companies are misrepresenting themselves as “organic” to command a premium price, and 60% would like a reliable way to distinguish real organic providers online from the pretenders. That’s why almost 60% of respondents claimed they…
Tucows Relaunches Realnames as Email Service – 11-Dec-14
Tucows uses name of dot.com bubble era company to launch new service. Remember RealNames? Tucows has brought back the name of the the dot.com bubble darling, but for a very different purpose. RealNames was a system designed to replace or circumvent domain names. Instead of typing a domain name like Money.com in your browser, you…
Trademark Holder of Beauty Lab Loses UDRP Bid The Grab MyBeautyLab.com, Too Generic – 11-Dec-14
The owner of the trademark for BeautyLab just lost its attempt to grab the domain name TheBeautyLab.com The sole UDRP panelist Brigitte Joppich bascially found that although the Complainant had valid trademarks registered before the domain name, including in the country where the domain holder operates, the term Beauty Lab was too generic to enjoy…