We reported earlier this week that Go Daddy had put together an agreement to take over the management of domains registered at RegisterFly - most specifically for the reason of returning control of those domains to the customers that registered them.

 

This is, of course, good news for RegisterFly customers, many of whom have been unable to manage or renew their domains for the better part of a year.

 

Presumably it’s good news for Go Daddy too. While I don’t doubt the general goodwill involved in the company’s effort to repair the situation, moving 850,000 domains on to the company’s network for no immediate financial gain is probably less of a burden for Go Daddy than a it might at first appear, considering the fact that Go Daddy’s business model generally sees the company acquire domain customers at a slight loss and make that money back by selling services (like Web hosting) to those domain customers.

 

Hospitably, Go Daddy has set up a relatively simple welcome page for RegisterFly customers, with a bit of information and a

 

As we also have reported, RegisterFly had been seemingly en route to collapse for some time, and is the target of a class action lawsuit blaming the company for lost domains and lost revenues, among other things.

 

Yesterday, ICANN sent a press release officially endorsing Go Daddy’s solution to the RegisterFly issue. The release offered comment from ICANN president and CEO Dr. Paul Twomey on the issue:

 

"The RegisterFly situation has been extremely difficult - first and foremost for registrants, as well as for the entire registry and registrar community."

 

True. And ICANN, which is singled out in the aforementioned class action suit as failing to handle the RegisterFly situation quickly or effectively, is happy to have a solution it can get behind.

 

Twomey, in the press release, says:

 

"ICANN had been actively seeking participants to act as a transfer provider to bulk transfer RegisterFly records to another accredited registrar. We have ended that process because the GoDaddy.com agreement is a better solution for RegisterFly customers since it's a direct and automatic transfer to a competent and experienced customer service oriented organization."

 

Twomey says companies had commendably volunteered to take part in the transfer program ICANN was developing. He also mentions that Afilias and VeriSign had waived considerable fees to make the transfer work, and that Tucows was active in helping to pursue a solution.

Lawyers for Gary Kremen, the long-suffering rightful owner of the sex.com domain, issued a press release last week announcing that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals had issued an order dismissing the most recent appeal of a $65,000,000 judgment against Stephen Michael Cohen, effectively ending the decade-plus sex.com saga.

Effectively, that is, because Cohen is apparently able to appeal the decision, however the court has warned him that it would "consider imposing sanctions" if he were to do so.

The announcement (justifiably) plays up the significance of the case as a landmark in Internet law and one of the really epic stories of the Internet age. It even references a book that is apparently to be published on the case:

This domain name battle has been so dynamic and had such an impact on the Internet industry that Quercus Publishing PLC has published a new book on the Kremen v. Cohen suit. Authored by Kieren McCarthy, the book is entitled, "Sex.com: One Domain, Two Men, Twelve Years and the Brutal Battle for the Jewel in the Internet's Crown."

I really only take issue with one thing, which is the decision to refer to a URL that pointed for years to a porno-site banner farm as "the jewel in the Internet's crown." Call me old fashioned, but I feel like there may be a bit of a sophistication gap in that comparison. And I'm not even English.

I do understand the comparison, however, in terms of a small thing having an enormous value - in this case, six characters and a punctuation mark leading to Cohen owing Kremen an eight-figure US-dollar amount.

Sex.com is possibly the most inherently valuable domain name, in terms of the amount of type-in traffic it did, and probably still does, receive, along with the nature of that traffic and the potential for turning it into clicks - particularly clicks that eventually lead to money spent.

For those really really late to the ballgame, I'll try to sum up the back story in a few sentences. Kremen registered the domain back in '94. Cohen used a fraudulent fax to convince the registrar (Network Solutions) to transfer the domain to his possession. He set up a banner/links farm on the page that reportedly generated between $50,000 and $500,000 per month, and continued to operate that site until 2000, when the courts ordered Network Solutions to return the domain to Kremen. Cohen has since been appealing rulings that he pay Kremen $65,000,000, an amount that includes $40,000,000 in lost earnings. Kremen has since sued VeriSign and Network Solutions for, you know, giving his super-valuable domain to some guy without asking him. Cohen also left the country during the legal-battle period and was arrested in Mexico in 2005.

You know, it might actually be an interesting book.

As far as the press release was concerned, though, it seems worth commemorating the apparent conclusion of the case simply for the impact it had on the development of the notion of ownership relative to domains. Particularly in the July 2003 ruling that domains do, in fact, constitute property in the traditional sense - the ruling that enabled Kremen to sue VeriSign over the unauthorized transfer.

The announcement quoted Richard Idell, of the lawfirm Idell & Seitel, which represented Kremen in the case:

"The underlying case to this appeal rewrote the law, and shaped the history and development of the Internet as we know it. Hopefully, the result here will send a loud and clear message that the decision stands and is the future of the Internet domain name business."

We reported last week that VeriSign had announced increases to the registry fees for the .com and .net domains.

Beginning in October, VeriSign will raise the fees 42 cents for the.com and 35 cents for the .net domain.

The increase is the maximum amount allowed by VeriSign's new contract with ICANN (7 percent). I suppose it wasn't technically a sure thing, but I certainly would have picked "maximum amount allowed by contract" in the office pool.

Tom Galvin, the VeriSign representative two whom I had the chance to speak, explained the details of the deal, specifically the price increases.

"In the entire course of the VeriSign agreement, over six years, the most the registry fee can go up is $1.86. So it doesn't give us carte blanche on how much we can raise it. It creates specific limits, saying it can only be raised in four of six years, and the cumulative amount of that total means that in six years, it can go from $6 to $7.86 at its height."

At the time of the announcement VeriSign pointed out that, according to its own research, according to its own research, the average per-year retail price for .com domains among the top 10 registrars is $20.24, and $20.25 for .net domains. The point being, of course, that the increase in price is unlikely to affect domain customers directly.

I was curious, though, just how much the change would affect the bottom line at VeriSign, being as even 42 cents can build up pretty quickly over the course of a few hundred thousand domain registrations.

According to DomainTools.com, there were 787,319 new domains registered in the last 24 hours. And, while there's no way of knowing exactly how many domains might be registered in a given day come October, I think it's fairly safe to assume the rate of domain registrations is in no immediate danger of decreasing.

So let's imagine that 787,319 .com domains are registered on October 15th. That amounts to $330,673.98. And while I'm not perfectly acquainted with the specific financials of VeriSign, $1.5 million a week seems like a fairly significant infusion of new revenue by any standard. And that's just for .com. The .net domain would be worth another $26,497.10 a day.

There could be more to the equation, but the basic fact of the matter would seem to be that the price increase will mean a major bump in revenues at VeriSign come October.

TAGS: verisign, .com, .com

We reported this week that ICANN had taken a second look at a revised proposal for the .xxx domain, submitted by the ICM registry. The domain was struck down in May of 2006 by ICANN, in a 9-5 vote that reversed an earlier endorsement by the governing body.

The ICM Registry's new proposal includes additions to the ICM Registry's efforts to protect children, ensure registrants label content clearly, prohibit spam, prevent certain religious or culturally sensitive names from being registered and donate money to child safety organizations.

The .xxx domain has been in the works for years. And in case you're just getting caught up, we happen to have been paying attention from the start (In 2005, for instance, we published an interview with the VP of the ICM Registry, Jason Hendeles).

I thought perhaps I'd take a shot at summarizing the arguments for, and against, the .xxx domain - a project that has been particularly polarizing.

PRO

The arguments in favor of the .xxx domain generally have to do with its regulatory potential, or the fundamental value of compartmentalizing the Internet along the lines of the .travel or .museum domains.

Obviously, the domain would be a very effective classification for potentially offensive material. Hypothetically, adult material located on the .xxx domain would be much easier to: a) block, if you were a parent or a business owner; b) find, if that were what you were looking for; and c) avoid accidentally stumbling upon while innocently searching for something like "shirtless cowboys."

The specialized domain would, hypothetically again, enable easier regulation over the Internet's adult content, with sites hosted on .xxx domains held to certain professional standards, along the lines of the .mobi or .pro domains. Adult publishers would presumably be legitimized by virtue of their willingness to participate and submit to further regulation.

CON

Interestingly, opposition to the .xxx domain comes from people involved in the pornography business and from conservative Christian groups - two factions more typically found on opposing sides of a given argument.

The creation of an xxx domain would seem to imply a specialized area online for adult content. Of course, profitable, professionally-run adult businesses currently operating on .com domain in perfect compliance with every applicable law would not want (and, presumably, would not be expected) to give up their .com properties and move to the .xxx domain.

Despite the fact that the domain was not necessarily created to contain online pornography, adult publishers fear (and probably rightly so) that the creation of .xxx would inevitably lead to conservative legislators at least trying to legally limit adult content to that domain.

Whatever regulation the .xxx domain registry set out to impose would run into difficulty in accommodating standards of decency, ages of consent and other local variations from around the world. The other danger here is that the knee-jerk "solution" to that problem might be to impose American standards of decency on material hosted in other countries (not to mention the conflict inherent in anything that implies an American control over Internet oversight - a little ironic, considering that the US government's influence is the main reason the .xxx proposal was rejected).

The creation of the .xxx domain, the regulation it would impose, and the separation it would attempt to create would invite many difficult-to-answer questions about what kind of content can be described as "sexually explicit."

For existing adult publishers, of which there is certainly no shortage, the .xxx domain would seem to be short on tangible benefits and long on hassles. In a sense, it's just another domain to register, another property to manage, another channel in which to defend copyrights and another opportunity for cyber squatters.

The folks who object to adult material in general on ethical grounds object to the creation of a domain specifically for adult content because it lends that material a legitimacy they don't believe it should possess.

While the anti-pornography argument made up only a small slice of the overall theoretical objection to the .xxx domain, it was the overwhelming cause for the original rejection of the domain's proposal. Conservative groups like the American Family Association exerted pressure on the US government, which in turn exerted its influence over ICANN.

I'm skeptical whether the re-submitted proposal will have ultimately result in a .xxx domain. After all, the movement that saw the domain rejected in May was driven by an opposition to pornography in general, not by a rejection of the ICM Registry's specific plan for the domain's operation.

I'm also skeptical as to the value of a .xxx domain, as I generally am with sponsored top-level domains. I've never visited a Web address with a .aero extension, for instance. In fact, I couldn't name a single .aero site. But I suppose maybe the airplane business types don't want me nosing around their Web sites anyway.

The people building .xxx Web sites, though, they do want new visitors on their Web sites. It's their bread and butter. Frankly, I just don't see the domain's value.

(As with previous declarations of skepticisim, I'd like to invite anybody who feels they could offer up another pro or con to leave a comment.)

Tags: .xxx domain, icann, icm registry