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But…but…I couldn’t buy the domain I want!
A WIPO panelist has found a nonprofit guilty of reverse domain name hijacking after it tried to take neta.org, a name registered two decades before the organization existed. The case is a clean illustration of what the UDRP does and does not do — and of how a failed purchase attempt can end up as evidence against the buyer.
Domain Name Wire
Read the full storyGermany’s .de domain name turns 40
Germany's .de has passed 18 million names in its 40th year. The milestone says less about demand than about how a mature country code, a member-owned registry and a local market behave once growth flattens.
Domain Name Wire
Pending Delete Schedule Change Has Been a Challenge
A six-hour move in the pending delete bidding deadline pushes drop-catch decisions into the early morning for bidders in US time zones. The mechanism is ordinary — a platform setting its own close — but it reshuffles who gets a clean look at the day's inventory before the clock runs out.
DomainInvesting.com
AdMedia moves to dismiss Yahoo’s trademark forgery suit, argues registration would have lapsed
A forged signature, a motion to dismiss, and the question every seller and buyer of a premium domain eventually meets: when the name changes hands, what happens to the trademark rights sitting behind it? Yahoo's suit against AdMedia turns on that separation, and the answer is not as obvious as it looks.
1 sale cited
Domain Name Wire
India’s biggest public company tries to reverse hijack domain name
A WIPO panelist has found that Reliance Industries tried to reverse hijack jiolat.com — using the domain dispute system against a registrant whose name came first. The ruling is a reminder of what the UDRP can and cannot do, and of how much a dated paper trail is worth.
Domain Name Wire
Twenty-one new end user domain sales
Sedo's latest end-user list is a sample of what operating businesses pay for names they intend to use, not what investors pay for names they intend to resell. The pattern in these twenty-one sales — paired purchases, a heavy German ccTLD weighting, four-figure descriptive compounds — says more about buyer motive than about where the market is heading.
Top USD sale lakewedowee
Domain Name Wire
New top level domain applicants to get $41 million in refunds
ICANN budgeted its new top-level domain programme against 1,000 applications and received about 1,615. The excess implementation fees are going back to applicants, roughly $24,000 each. The refund is small against the cost of applying, but it says something about the size of the round and the price of entry into it.
Domain Name Wire
Shopify filing confirms $99 million acquisition of shop.com domain name
Shopify's quarterly SEC filing puts a number on shop.com: $99 million recorded as intangible assets. It is the largest price ever confirmed for a domain name in a public company's accounts, and it gives the premium end of the market a reference point it has not had before.
Top sale shop
Domain Name Wire
Hey lawyers, UDRP isn’t a shortcut for trademark litigation
A UDRP panel has turned away a complaint brought by a company that wanted the policy to settle a trademark dispute rather than a cybersquatting case. The denial is a useful marker of where the line sits, and of what a domain holder still faces after winning.
Domain Name Wire
Two weeks of Sedo domain name sales led by Tick.com
Sedo's two-week sales report is topped by a single $600,000 word .com, with everything beneath it in the four and five figures. The list is a sample of what cleared at one venue over fourteen days, and the useful reading separates the outlier from the ordinary trade beneath it.
Top USD sale tick
TheDomains.com
Are these TLDs this round’s .sucks?
A new application round includes strings that read like verdicts on brands — .scam, .sus, .ass — alongside .official and .brand. The lesson of .sucks is that the tone of a string matters less than the pricing and eligibility rules attached to it. Holders should watch the mechanics, not the vocabulary.
Domain Name Wire
The fascinating afterlife of expired domains
Expired domains keep their rankings and their inbound links for a while after they lapse, and buyers now bid on that residue. A cluster of September auction sales shows what some of them do with it: cloaking, fabricated authorship and redirect chains that end at other expired names. For anyone holding or buying a name, the traffic is real — and so is the exposure that comes with it.
Top sale bitcoinfoundation
Domain Name Wire