A Virgina federal judge has ruled that domain names are not property under Virgina Law. The case is ALEXANDRIA SURVEYS, LLC, , v. ALEXANDRIA CONSULTING GROUP, LLC, (ACG)  Civil Action No. 1:13-CV-00891, United States District Court, E.D. Virginia, Alexandria Division and was handed down by District Judge LIAM O’GRADY The case was an appeal from [...] Continue reading →

Domain hacks have been in the news a lot lately as startups are definitely a fan of short, memorable, one word brand names. One of the top TLDs for domain hacks has been .ly thanks in no small part to Bit.ly who really kicked-off the domain hack trend years ago. Yesterday Prompt.ly, a company focused [...] Continue reading →

Ferrero Rocher, the Italian makers of numerous chocolate desserts, including the world-renowned Nutella, are bringing sweet surprises by Christmas. The Ferrero gTLD application for .NUTELLA isn’t surprising; Amazon did the same for .KINDLE and other products. But it’s not a closed, defensive application, as Ferrero plans to start a worldwide campaign, to restore its name [...] Continue reading →

It’s difficult to predict the outcome of community objections. As of yesterday the International Chamber of Commerce had published 21 community objection decisions. Objectors have won just four of the cases. Time for new top level domain applicants to rejoice? Hardly. Much like string confusion objections, community objection decisions and how panelists arrive at their [...] Continue reading →

ICANN has terminated the registrar accreditation of Dynamic Dolphin, which it turned out was owned by self-professed “Spam King” Scott Richter. The company has until December 20 to take down its ICANN logo and cease acting as a registrar. ICANN, in its termination notice (pdf) late last week, said that it only became aware earlier [...] Continue reading →

Back in May 2012 when the application period for a new gTLD’s  closed, the application fee was $185,000 per new gTLD string. At that time the value of a Bitcoin was trading at around $5.00. Instead of applying for a new gTLD string for $185,000 what if the applicant would have bought 37,000 Bitcoins, at [...] Continue reading →

April 2016. That’s the likely date of the final new gTLD contention set auction under the rules currently anticipated by ICANN. As you might imagine, many applicants are not happy about this. In a series of presentations over the last couple of weeks, ICANN has laid out how it sees its “last resort” auctions playing [...] Continue reading →