Jaei England had purchased the name cosmopolitan.co.uk in hopes of extorting a few bucks. He even sent a letter to the Cosmopolitan magazine publisher threatening to turn it into a porn site if not ‘paid off’. Now Jaei England will pay £4000 in damages and is likely to lose many of his other cybersquatted [...] Continue reading →

The corporate giants scored another win today when the small software company VirtualWorks lost the domain name VW.net to Volkswagen for cybersquatting. The two companies had battled in court in the past with VirtualWorks winning the rights to the name. [...] Continue reading →

The site DodiAlfayed.com was registered by a man from Dayton, Ohio and then almost immediately put up for sale on GreatDomains.com for $500,000. The name Dodi Al Fayed was made famous when Mohamed Al Fayed (nicknamed Dodi) died in the car crash with Princess Diana. The name was registered as a European Community [...] Continue reading →

ICANN revised its plan to allow internet users to elect a number of ICANN members, but the e-world will still get its say. Instead of the users electing representatives who will then elect members, the users will elect members from a number of ‘at-large’ candidates selected by the board. [...] Continue reading →

Microsoft is pushing the RealNames service to form a standard in the keyword game started by America Online. The RealNames software substitutes complicated urls with easy-to-remember keywords, but leaves the decision of which url to replace with which keyword open to the portal (which will likely side with the highest bidder). [...] Continue reading →

VeriSign announced today that it had bought out Network Solutions for $21 billion, and has become the new controller of the Domain Name System (DNS). [...] Continue reading →

The big question on everyone’s mind is whether or not ICANN will expand the top-level domain base. ICANN spokesperson says it will eventually, but has other issues to resolve first. Other questions include, “will anyone with an email address be allowed to vote on certain issues?” and “what will they do about cybersquatters?” [...] Continue reading →