FEDs seized 82 domain names

http://leahy.senate.gov

Today many of the Internet users, especially those making money on IP rights infringements, are afraid of upcoming Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act, US Senate bill commonly known as COCIA introduced by Senator Patrick Leahy (Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee). COICA proposes amendments to Chapter 113 of Title 18 of the United States Code authorizing Attorney General to bring an in rem action against domain names "used by an Internet site dedicated to infringing activities". The general conclusion of the bill is that "upon receipt of such order, the domain name registrar or domain name registry shall suspend operation of, and lock the domain name". COICA paves the way to fast and efficient removal of the domain names pointing to web sites dedicated to infringing activities from DNS.

DHS seizes Internet
Bill S.3804 recently passed Senate Judiciary Committee (19-0) and is awaiting a vote from the Senate. Those responsible for inter alia IP rights infringements, were sleeping (quite) well, at least until the bill will (if ever) be passed... but suddenly domain names started disappearing from the net...

Current content of one of the sized sites today

Few days ago, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) surprised many, seizing 82 domain names of commercial websites involved in selling counterfeit goods. Operation called "In Our Sites v. 2.0" was spearheaded by the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center (IPR Center) led by ICE's Office of Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), in coordination with the Criminal Division's Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section and nine U.S. Attorneys' Offices.


Plenty of choices
The biggest surprise for many is that neither provisions of Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) or Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA) has been applied (the latter is not yet in power). Department of Homeland Security (DHS) executed "traditional" court-ordered seizure warrants against a number of domain names preceded by undercover purchases from online retailers suspected of selling counterfeit goods.

With existing DMCA, current DHS practice and upcoming COICA are we facing more and more such seizures? The recent DHS actions show that digital-business becomes easier to be targeted by US-based Law Enforcement Agencies and more different practical tools and methods can be used to enforce the law:

• (traditional) physical closure of the business and seizures of the equipment etc.,
• (traditional) blocking (removing) the illegal content located on the servers,
• (new) domain seizures at the Registrar level,
• (new) domain seizures at the Registry level,
• (new) removal of the Name Servers,
• (new) blocking financial transaction provider from completing payment transactions between its customers located within the United States and the Internet site.

Are ccTLDs a safe-haven?
Are the criminals going to move to Internet-safe havens (ccTLDs) not being under US jurisdiction? Quite likely, but which (cc)TLDs are going to be the safe havens? Crooks will be soon forced to use not only domain names from outside the jurisdiction of US but also:

• Registrars,
• DNS service providers (Name Servers),
• collocation or hosting providers,
• financial transaction providers.

Welcome to the new world.

QR Code

Marketing: How to loose money with Google AdWords

Google AdWords are not difficult to manage campaigns, optimize keywords, setting budget, max. CPC etc. But why to set up a campaign? The answer is simple. You get through to customers who are already searching for the product or service that your company offers.

Let's focus on the example. If the customers search for "mobile phone", it's easy to understand that mobile carriers should use "mobile phone" keyword(s) to display Ads in search results and get the customers in. This is the "normal" way - you pay for the clicks you can't get for free. When customer enters Your company name (like "Yon Consulting" in my case) and the results bring Your company on the first place (like in the example below) in the search results, why to display Your advertisement too?

 

Why to promote yourself paying for your company name as keyword to get your advertisement on the top of the results you get for free??? Unfortunately it's quite typical mistake of the marketing departments in the big (and small) companies... Here are the examples...

Orange

Orange pays for their ad to be displayed if "orange" is typed in Google. Do they loose money? Yes. Do they care? No...

Galeries Lafayette 

The same story... check by yourself...

COMARCH

I can show you thousands of companies paying for their trademarks and company names as keywords. Do you also pay for your TM or company name to be displayed over your cost-free result(s)?

Domain Names Market is Changing

COM COM über alles, über alles in der Welt

 
Recent gossips that GoDaddy is promoting .CO as replacement for .COM surprised me. I did my research and found out (with relief) that such a great surprise is over and .COM is back to the throne. Has anything changed since .CO and .ME  launch and recent poor results of .TEL .BIZ or .MOBI aftermarket sales?

Yes, the main change is .CO popularity and in the contrary, low value sales of premium .ME domains and decreasing total number of .ME names in the zone. Additionally, sales of .TEL .BIZ or .MOBI are showing signs that such TLDs  are far from popularity among domainers.

Most dynamic TLDs
Here are the numbers - net increase between October and November 2010 in the following zones:

COM	621092
INFO	82414
NET	78423
ORG	60797
CO	42967
MOBI	2556
BIZ	931

The data clearly shows that .COM is still the most prominent for Registrars, then INFO goes, followed by NET ORG and... CO. The rest is not out of competition.

GoDaddy
So, how Registrars react to the changing primary (and secondary) market? The best way is to look at the starting pages of Registrars. Here they are:

GoDaddy promotes .COM, than .CO followed by .INFO .NET .ORG .ME and .MOBI

Name.com

Let's check what thinks Name.com:

The primary choice for name.com is quite similar: .COM .ME .NET .INFO .ORG .US .TEL. I'm a little bit surprised with such high positions of .TEL and .ME on name.com list. Telnic (operator of TEL domains) has net growth of only 298 domains in October and doMEn (operator of ME domains) has net decline of 2230 domains in October and 2082 in September.

Let's check what our colleagues from EuroDNS think about primary market. Here it is:

EuroDNS
EuroDNS is... different. The primary choice is .CO.NO and .SO - the two new extensions. .CO.NO is the most interesting - it's privately held 2nd level domain under most restrictive European TLD - .NO operated by NORID.

For companies/individuals operating in Norway, it's extremely difficult to register domains directly under .NO. Norwegians have the following alternatives:

• .COM (obvious), 
• .NU [1]
• .CO.NO. 

.EU is not an alternative for Norway due to the fact that Norway is not a member of the European Union.

To the contrary to .CO.NO, dotSO is the Country Code Top Level Domain (ccTLD) for The Republic of Somalia. It was redelegated to The Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications (MoPT) in April of 2009, and will be available to the public for Open Registration on March 1st, 2011.

Among other extensions, EuroDNS prefers .EU (yes, EuroDNS is an European company), than .COM (am I surprised? No), NET, ORG, MOBI (??? this is surprising due to the decreases in the recent months), INFO, BIZ, TEL.

Conclusions? 

1. Registrars focus on the new TLDs where the profit margin is higher than for "normal" registrations. The best choice is .CO.NO (I like it, probably I will register one name there), and dotSO.
2. The next comes .CO. Yes, Colombian ccTLD zone is still "empty" if compared to .COM and still nice (valuable) names are available...
3. The next are most popular gTLD: COM NET ORG
4. Keeping .TEL (Telnic) or .MOBI (Afilias) on the list is rather a mistake; decisions are probably not based on (business) analysis but "expectations" IMHO.

I will watch closely how Registrars react to the new world of domains. Is it going to be traditional (COM COM über alles, über alles in der Welt) market or something new is going on?

[1] .NU is the Internet country code top-level domain assigned to the island state of Niue.  "nu" in Swedish means "now" and regardless of the fact that Niue Island has no connections with Sweden or Norway, ".NU" become popular in Sweden and Norwegian businesses operating in Sweden.

.US Domain Is Back On Track...

...But Still Below It's Past Result.

October has become relatively a good month for .US domain operated by NeuStar. American ccTLD ended October with 1,610,492 names in the zone, 17,283 above September's results.

In the industry where almost every TLD is steady growing from month to month, .US lost -29,659 domain names in September and -2,902 names in August according to HosterStats.com

There are many different factors influencing Top Level Domain growth. I can bet that .US lost so many customers because of 2010-sales showing almost no value of the "2nd class" domains like .BIZ .INFO .MOBI .ASIA .TEL on the Secondary Market.
Domainers' investments in .BIZ or .MOBI become void, .COM and leading ccTLDs (.DE .UK .NL .BE .EU...) are the Kings and Queens of Internet.

For Americans (as well as for most of the businesses around the world), .COM is the primary choice for business and American citizens. US ccTLD has been always treated just as an investment similar to investments in .CO or .ME. This is the reason why NeuStar's baby joined the general trend for "2nd-Class" gTLDs and "investments" ccTLDs.

.US result is still above many ccTLDs from around the world, but it can never become a real ccTLD for Americans. There is no alternative to .COM in US for doing business on-line.