DomainTools Blog

Paul Stahura (CSO of DemandMedia) captured this video of the first in-person meeting of CORE back before the official formation of ICANN. The video was filmed November 7-10, 1997 (ten years to the day). When looking around the meeting you can see that there were plenty of people involved in the domain business back in the good old days. Some people have moved to registies, some people are no longer living, and some are still doing the exact same thing. Back in the late 90′s this group actually had a debate at one of the meetings discussing the fact they were running out of domain names. It was very certain that all single word domain names would be gone soon. The question was, what would registrars sell if there were no more good domain names left. Years later, it just sort of looks silly. We, the community register over 10 million domains a year now (that is 10 times more domains in one year then all the registrations combined leading up to 1999). The Internet community is continuing to register domain names at a faster and faster rate with no signs of slowing down, the acceleration continues.

“It was at the first full meeting of CORE, held in Tokyo. It is amazing to me how many of us are still around the industry.

Its kinda funny now to see this video knowing what we now know… this was pre-ICANN; and to see us all 10 years younger. Notice the lack of laptops at the meeting. Now when we meet, the tables are covered with them.

It’s a bit lengthy, about 20 minutes.

I pop in at the end, because I forgot to video myself during the meeting. For those who were there, you may remember this was the meeting when I bit through my tongue at dinner, and had to go to the hospital for stitches. eyow!, by beit mie thung.

Here’s to another 10 years!

Best,

Paul”

This video is a great time capsule. Thanks for sharing Paul!

Network Solution and eNom domain names that expire or delete will be landing in a new auction house this afternoon. The brand new NameJet appears to be a joint venture between eNom and Network Solutions. It appears eNom owns the NameJet.com domain name or at least controls it and Network Solutions owns the NameJet Trademark. The company NameJet, LLC was registered in Delaware on Oct 3rd. Traditionally domain names from those two domain companies have gone through Snapnames prior to deleting. Network Solutions started the process a few years ago when Snapnames struck a deal to be the primary auction place for all expiring domain names that Network Solutions was letting delete. Then earlier this year eNom’s deleting domain names started appearing at Snapnames.

NameJet is launching this afternoon, you can be assured that they are actively talking to other registrars to join the program. Snapnames was the first and biggest Pending Delete auction marketplace, I think it will be a matter of time before NameJet takes that title. The company that controls the Network Solution deleting domains controls the market. NameJet seems to have come out of no where and is moving fast. The caliber of Network Solutions domains is awesome because most of the generic domain names where registered at Network Solutions back before the multiple registrar system was invented.

Taryn Naidu was the past president of Pool.com joined eNom last year around November. It would be likely that Taryn is the project leader for NameJet. Paul Stahura was quoted last year saying, “Taryn is a true domain name player whose expertise coupled with his solid reputation is very valuable. We have our sights set on growing the aftermarket business, and with Taryn’s experience, we can implement our new aftermarket strategy.”

I will keep everyone posted as more details of NameJet come out.

UPDATE: It appears the NameJet is live. ClubDrop has moved its auctions to NameJet.com. ClubDrop is dead, long live NameJet.

Just to give and update. We will be launching the sign-up process for Domain Roundtable on Tuesday. We want to thank Demand Media, they have stepped up and donated free eNom resellers accounts along with $100 in credit for the first 100 people that sign-up.

You can’t sign up now, so go enjoy the extended holiday weekend!

We will be busy preparing for the Show and will talk to you next week.

If you would like to sponsor or speak please email us at 2007info [at] domainroundtable.com.

Charles S. Hilliard is joining Demand Media as President and Chief Financial Officer (CFO) effective June 1, 2007.  Hilliard was previously the President and CFO of United Online. In his role at Demand Media, Hilliard will lead the company’s finance team as well as its general business operations.

Hilliard has served as United Online’s CFO since April 1999, when he joined its predecessor, NetZero, and was promoted to President in May 2006. During Hilliard’s tenure, United Online has achieved a 100-fold increase in annual revenues as he helped lead the former start-up venture through its IPO and strategic evolution into a highly profitable member of the Standard & Poor’s 400 Index with annual revenues in excess of $500 million. In his newly created role at Demand Media, Hilliard brings over 20 years of experience in corporate financial and strategic management, investment banking and public accounting.

“The trajectory of Demand Media’s business, and its vision for digital media’s future, is very exciting,” said Hilliard. “As the company celebrates its one-year anniversary, I look forward to joining an already impressive management team whose achievements during the past 12 months have been extraordinary. My goal is to provide additional firepower as the team takes the company’s success and maturation to the next level.”

“Parting with the United Online family after eight years is a very challenging decision,” Hilliard continued, “particularly in light of the success we have shared and the bright prospects we believe we have in the Content & Media segment. I am grateful for the experience and relationships built over the years and believe that I depart at a time when United Online’s business is sound.”

Prior to United Online, Hilliard was an investment banker for nine years with Morgan Stanley & Co. and Merrill Lynch & Co. where he was involved with the successful execution of over $34 billion of strategic and financing transactions. Hilliard graduated with a B.S. in Business Administration from the University of Southern California and earned an M.B.A. from the University of Michigan. He began his career an accountant with Arthur Andersen & Co. from 1985 to 1988 and was licensed as a certified public accountant in 1988.

Over the last few months, a number of users had contacted eNom support about products they had never actually purchased from eNom directly. However, several resellers had registered different variations on the eNom name. Those resellers were trying to camouflage their identity as eNom. This situation started to cause a lot of brand confusion and in one extreme case someone had registered eNom Hosting.com and was trying to sell eNom’s hosting products. It appears that the legal team asked the programmers to find all domains with eNom in it and remove the offending domain from the resellers account and move it into the corporate eNom account. We are not sure if it was the legal department who issued the order, but the instructions were carried out without double checking the results or without management approval. This caused a few names that were, in fact, legitimately not infringing to be transfered as well. We heard about a great spanish domain name, Sobrenombre.com, which was affected by the mistake. Sobrenombre of course means Nickname in spanish. This is a good example of why short trademark names can lead to mistakes in filtering if the word length is too short. The word enombre and venom for example both contain the string eNom. It appears no DNS was affected and it was just the whois for a few hours. I talked with Paul Stahura the President, and he told me the email was a mistake and that it did not have management approval. The mistake should be corrected in the next few hours if anyone was affected.

=====Orginal email=============================
to xxxxxxxx@gmail.com
cc Legal
date May 8, 2007 4:07 PM
subject sobrenombre.com
mailed-by enom.com

Dear Sir or Madam,

You registered the domain name [sobrenombre.com]. The registration and/or use of these domain names infringes our trade and service marks.

Therefore, we have taken steps to transfer the domain name to our own accounts and have refunded the registration fee to you. If you have any questions, please contact our legal department at legal@enom.com.

In the future, if we determine that you have again registered domain names which infringe our trademark or service mark, we may close your account and prohibit you from doing future business with us.

Regards,

Enom, Inc.
=============================================

I thought I would cover an Industry icon in today’s post. Paul Stahura is the COO of Demand Media and Founder of eNom. He is considered by myself and others as one of the most clever people in the domain industry. One of Paul’s recent ideas at the ICANN Lisbon last month was a concept of Secure Blobs for Law Enforcement. What if all registrars output a secure blob at the end of every whois record. This would allow people with decryption keys to decipherer the secured thick whois text. Keys would be given out to law enforcement agencies that access the blobs. Law enforcement would also be kept anonymous to the registrars because their is no way to tell who is looking at the blob and who is looking at the plain text record. The request would appear to be just another whois lookup. Everyone would be able to see the thin contact record (AKA OPOC record) and the thick secure blob would be for anyone with a key.

I am not sure if the idea is practical – could international governments share a key? The idea is definitely interesting and would require more thought.

On another Note, Paul said he might join the Blog’O Sphere soon. The domain industry needs more bloggers. This would be a good platform for Demand Media to announce important milestones. I caught news on TechCrunch that Paul’s company Demand Media just re-launched Dot TV. I noticed that the CEO Richard.tv resolves to a grovy site but Paul.tv goes to a Demand Media parking page. Everyone at Demand Media got a Dot TV domain name as a launch present. Chris Ambler the Chief Software Strategist got Ambler.TV where he hosts videos of himself taking pictures of women at a lingerie shoot.

A new domain media company seems to have emerged out of Vancouver Canada. They just launched their website and their is a lot of interesting information on it. After reading through the website, it is clear that this new media company has been in stealth mode for a while and that they are on the same scale as other Industry Giants. They own some killer domain names like Attorney.com, Cheap Travel.com, Laptop.com, Digital Camera.com, Hot Springs.com, HD TV.com, Cellular Phones.com, Religion.com, Beat.com, and Venture.com. The company does not list all their domain names they own, but we assume they have other great names as well.

On their management page they list two co-founders (Kevin Ham, Colin Yu), and as you would expect from a Media company in the Direct Navigation space, they both own their own their .COM personal names. The two co-founders were high school friends and then later both attended the University of British Columbia. Later, after college, they started this company together.

Reinvent’s mission statement page is littered with awesome domain names that act as the title of each section, Mission Plan.com, Vision Statements.com, The History.com, Great Corp.com, Innovations.com, Team Building Exercises.com, Enjoying.com, Community Outlook.com

Reinvent Technology, Inc. was formally named Host Start, but the Host Start domain still does not redirect to Reinvent yet. Some background information was provided about their stealth mode operations on one of their pages:

Our humble beginnings, in 1999, started much like many internet startups, in the living room, as opposed to the garage. Founded by a family doctor who wanted to base his medical practice on his patients and not on time or money, he started an internet business during his residency in order to build a passive income. By the time his residency was completed, the business was doing so well that he decided to run the business for another year and then go back to medicine. That has yet to happen, seven years after the fact.

He was joined in late 2000 by his long-time high school friend, who had a background in banking. The company continues to grow and all their waking hours were spent building the business, all with specific goals in mind.

With the quantity and quality of domains in their portfolio this has to be considerable and formidable company to Name Media, Demand Media, Marchex, Name Administration Media, and Internet REIT.

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Paul Stahura (COO of Demand Media) and Myself will be speaking at the Harvard Business School Club of Puget Sound lunch this Wednesday. It should be an interesting talk on where the Domain Industry is going and what opportunities exist for winning in the domain marketplace today. I have seen a lot of changes in 10 years, and so much has matured. People would have said the market was tapped out in 2001 when the bubble burst, but we have seen that the market is hotter today than ever before. The levels of satisfaction and understanding by some people in this industry is incredible. We have seen whole domain eco-systems rise and fall in a matter of months based on a few key players leveraging policy at the highest levels. What eco-system will start tomorrow is anyones guess, but I have a few I will be sharing.  If you are in Seattle, I would encourage you to come join us for lunch. It would be good to have a few hardcore domainers in the audience for support. It would also be a good networking event, considering the guy next to you at your table has an MBA in Business from Harvard. Lunch is $35 for non-members.

The rough outline for Paul and myself is as follows:

• Overview of the Domain Industry: origins to present (10-15 mins)
• What is hot in the Domain Industry now (10-15 mins)
• Current Trends and the Future Growth Predictions (20-25 mins)
• Q & A (20-25 mins)

The sign-up form is online.

Lawyers smell blood in the water after RegisterFly imploded and ICANN issued a notice of termination. It appears the Dummit Law Firm has been filing class action lawsuits for over 15 years and they know the power of the Internet, as they like to take on web signups for cases. They had a famous case last year when an intern working for them heard about a chemical-plant explosion in his hometown and raced to the local court house at 7am the next morning to be the first law firm to file the case. In the current RegisterFly case, they are suing not only RegisterFly but ICANN and eNom. We know RegisterFly doesn’t have any money left because they blew it on escorts and liposuction, but I think they are more interested in ICANN’s money. That actually hurts domain owners in the long run, as ICANN receives most of its funding from the sale of domain names. If Dummit was successful, the money would ultimately get paid for by other owners of domain names. Those clients in the lawsuit that were really affected might get a buck or a free domain name out of the whole deal. Class Action lawsuits are out of control in the US – the lawyers get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars. Meanwhile, ICANN will need to raise its fees and pass the cost on to registries and registrars.

As for suing eNom, eNom had handled RegisterFly as a reseller for several years, but eNom has cooperated and gone out of its way to help if a RegisterFly customer came to them and their domain names were inside the eNom registrar credential. I think by naming eNom, they are reaching a bit far. Why not sue Verisign or Afilias since, after all, they are the registries. Sheesh, I think Dummit got the facts wrong. RegistryFly reported on its website that it had Registered 2 Million domains, but as we count it, that must have been since the beginning of time. They certainly don’t have that many domain names under management. They have less than 400,000 domain in their own cred for COM and NET. And it looks like they have 500,000 names in INFO.

I feel for the victims and they should be helped, but I hate Class Action lawsuits. I have yet to hear about the criminal case. I wonder how long Kevin and John will spend in jail?

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Chris Sheridan just announced that he has taken the job at Demand Media’s eNom subsidiary as the new VP of Customer Service and Business Development. He will be reporting to SVP John Kane. This is a great hire for eNom because Mr Sheridan has been a Senior Account Manager at Verisign for the past 8 years. While at Verisign, Sheridan managed relationships with many ICANN registrars. His experience with domains and registration process is top notch and could be considered a dream hire. Sheridan’s last day at Verisign will in the middle of April. He is hoping to move out to Seattle by the middle of May. One of the projects I am sure Seridan will work on is the .TV domains that eNom has recently taken over.

I have nothing but praise for Sheridan because he has been very responsive to Name Intelligence when we call him with questions. He even gave us his cell phone number so we could call him at 3am if we ran into problems with regular customer service. This is a major upgrade to eNom’s customer service and eNom customers can expect the changes to start appearing over the summer as Sheridan sets goals and takes active leadership.

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