• Domain names go to auction
  BUSINESSES not content with owning a slice of real estate in St Kilda or Bondi will soon be able to buy the rights to use suburb names in internet addresses
  .... full story

05/27/2005

• iTunes 'cybersquatting' row threatens Nominet authority
  The authority of the UK's domain name registrar has been called into question after the owner of the domain name iTunes.co.uk investigated what rights the registrar had to make him hand the URL to Apple.
  Benjamin Cohen, who registered the iTunes.co.uk address three years before Apple launched its popular music store, was ordered to transfer rights to the URL to Apple by .uk registrar Nominet in March.
  Nominet, Cohen contends, has no authority to make him transfer iTunes.co.uk - and he has a statement from the Department of Trade and Industry to prove it
  .... full story
  
• Cohen disputes UK registry's legitimacy
  The company that runs the UK's Internet registry is not officially recognised by the government and as such has no right to decide what should be done with the millions of domains that it sells each year.
  That at least is the claim of Ben Cohen, former owner of iTunes.co.uk, who lost ownership of the domain to Apple in March after a ruling by an independent expert hired through Nominet's domain resolution process
  .... full story
  
• Appeals court in Virginia hears arguments over Falwell Web domain name
  A Web site critical of the Rev. Jerry Falwell's views on gays contains constitutionally protected, noncommercial speech and should be allowed to keep its name -- a common misspelling for the conservative evangelist, a lawyer for the site owner argued Thursday
  .... full story

05/26/2005

• Fans urge ICANN celebrity blogger to keep on blogging
  Joichi Ito, the American businessman who after a kind of immaculate conception hatched forth as a pre-formed internet celebrity a couple of years ago, is having a crisis
  .... full story

05/24/2005

• Forgetting to renew domain name can be disastrous for business
  If the Web is your small or home business' front door, losing control of your Internet domain name can be catastrophic
  .... full story
  
• Geographic domain names released
  Australian businesses will be able to register commercial geographic domain names such as stkilda.com.au and bondi.net.au from 1 June
  .... full story

05/20/2005

• Secret, Closed WHOIS Meeting Excludes Privacy Advocates
  Today (Friday, May 20) a secret meeting is taking place in Washington DC. WHOIS is on the agenda. Called by Bruce Tonkin, Chair of the ICANN GNSO, it will include virtually every business-related constituency in ICANN: ISPs, Intellectual Property interests, Marilyn Cade's Business Constituency, and various US government agencies: Department of Justice, FBI, Department of Commerce and Federal Treade Commission - all strong and intransigent advocates of preventing any privacy protection for WHOIS data. Registrars and registries in limited numbers will be there.
  Conspicuous by their absence is the Noncommercial Users Constituency and any other civil society representatives of privacy rights. This is an unfortuantely typical example of how policy making gets done in ICANN. Behind the scenes, the major players get together with the US Government and cut a deal. The formal policy making process is bypassed, it is just a charade
  .... full story

05/19/2005

• VeriSign to put more backbone into the Net
  VeriSign plans to significantly increase the number of DNS servers it operates, a move that it says will make a key part of the Internet's infrastructure more resilient to cyberattacks
  .... full story

05/18/2005

• Domain Hijacking, and Cyber-Squatting Awareness...
  Domain hijacking is the practice of stealing an organization or individual website name. The hijacker could send the current owner a phony or misleading registration transfer approval form or submit a fraudulent transfer authorization to the current website host. Website owners who are not vigilant can fall prey to these practices
  .... full story

05/17/2005

• ICANN Posts Proposed FY 2005-06 Budget
  Proposed Budget:Fiscal Year 2005– 2006
  .... full story

05/13/2005

• June start for .au geographic domain ballots
  The Australian domain names regulator has announced it will kick off the ballots for new geographic domain names in .net.au and .com.au from next month
  .... full story

05/12/2005

• ".travel" contract signed. Contractor sold.
  ICANN signed a contract with Tralliance Corp. on 5 May 2005 to operate a ".travel" sponsored top-level Internet domain (sTLD), and today TheGlobe.com (a/k/a Voiceglo.com) exercised its option to purchase Tralliance Corp., according to a press release today from TheGlobe.com (you may have to register to view the release unless you navigate to it via Google News
  .... full story

05/11/2005

• Nominet gets new Chairman
  Nominet UK, the Oxford-based domain name registry today announced the appointment of Bob Gilbert as Chairman of the company. He replaces Willie Black, the founder of Nominet, who left the company in December 2004
  .... full story

05/10/2005

• Actor Morgan Freeman wins cybersquatting case
  American actor Morgan Freeman, winner of this year's best supporting actor Oscar for his performance in "Million Dollar Baby," won a cybersquatting case in a ruling by an international arbitrator Tuesday.
  Freeman was found to have common law rights to the contested Internet domain name, which had been registered by a Saint Kitts and Nevis-based web site operator
  .... full story

05/09/2005

• Domain Name Business Booming in Post-Dot-Com Era
  The volume of domain name transactions in 2004 was up 300 percent from 2003. Consolidated data from DNJournal, Domain-Spiegel.de and Sedo.com, three leading independent companies tracking the domain name marketplace, shows the average sale price of dot-com domains is more than US$9,700.
  .... full story
  
• Networks Solutions Becomes SSL Certificate Authority
  Network Solutions has entered the SSL certificate market, continuing an expansion beyond its core domain name products. By becoming a certificate authority, NetSol will now compete against its former owner VeriSign, currently the largest seller of SSL certificates. VeriSign owned Network Solutions from 2000 until 2003, when it was sold to a prviate investment firm, Pivotal Private Equity. Network Solutions manages more than 6.5 million domain name
  .... full story
  
• Google DNS glitch sparks hacking fears
  A Domain Name System (DNS) glitch left many surfers unable to reach Google for a short time on Saturday (7 May). The SNAFU also left Google services such as Gmail and AdSense unavailable for around 15 minutes between 2345 and 0000 (BST) on Saturday night.
  .... full story

05/06/2005

• Europe annexes Caribbean islands
  You often hear it said that the Internet is redrawing the map of the world, but little did any of us know that was a literal truth.
  Because - at least according to Internet overseer ICANN - 20,000 square miles of Caribbean water and land has been lifted intact, transported 5000 miles east and deposited in the heart of Europe
  .... full story

05/03/2005

• Verisign and .net: a winner all the way
  ICANN skewed the process to select a new owner for the .net registry in favour of incumbent owner VeriSign. Our in-depth investigation into the process, which has proved highly controversial since a final report gave the six-year contract to VeriSign, has revealed that ICANN:br> .... full story
  
• Wal-Mart’s Domain Name Battles
  A recent decision by the WIPO Arbitration Center took the domain name walmartfacts.biz away from Jeff Milchen, a self-described Wal-Mart critic. The panel found that Milchen had "registered the name in bad faith," a term that has specific meaning under ICANN’s Uniform Domain-Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP).
  .... full story
  
• Nominet acts over Firevision debacle
  UK registry operator Nominet has at last acted against domain name registrar Firevision, which has left thousands of customers in limbo and unable to access their domain names
  .... full story
  
• Pope site goes to charity
  THE TECH book writer who correctly guessed the name of the next pope and cyber-squatted him has given the domain name up to charity
  .... full story

Click here to see the list of U.S. States and Countries with which we've done business registering domain names!