Domain Names costlier! .org hiked by 10%

Public Interest Registry, the registry for .org domain names, has notified ICANN that it is increasing the wholesale prices for .org domain names by 10%. The annual wholesale price for .org domain name registrations will be $6.75, slightly below the $6.86 rate that .com domains are expected to be available at later this year. As the profit margins are thin on domain registrations, the price hike will pinch not your favorite domain registrar’s pocket but yours!

Public Interest Registry has given no rational for the price increase to ICANN. As far as I can make out, it has the most obvious business interest in its mind - profits!

One can’t really blame Public Interest Registry for thinking about ways to increase its profits. After all, it has monopolistic control over the .org domain names! In fact, when .biz registry NeuStar raised prices last year, it was belligerent enough to state the reason for the price hike as - everyone else was doing it. What bullshit!

Also, there are talks that Afilias is all set to hike prices of .info and that NeuStar is already planning another hike in .biz prices.

I have always believed that this whole system of ICANN and domain name registries is rotten to the core. They all have a cartel of sorts. Why does the government allow such monopolistic market conditions to emerge? I wish some intelligent guy in the US will hire good lawyers and file a lawsuit against all this!

Why am I mad? Well, the simple reason is that I have loads of domains that I need to get renewed every year and even now it is quite a lot of money I have to spend. With the price increase it will be a whole lot of new burden.

Yes, yes… I know… you will ask me to monetize the domain to sustain themselves. But bro, monetization doesn’t work on its own. It requires a lot of time, skills and effort, which again costs money. A domainer like me is not a programmer or web designer or an SEO expert. To hire them, I would need to spend money. Domaining is getting costlier by the day. Tsk… Tsk…

if I keep it spending on sustenance, when do I get to enjoy it?

Ramp.com sold on eBay for 25k USD!

Premium domain name www.ramp.com sold for US $25,211 tonight!

The domain, Ramp.com was owned by Ramp Corporation which is being liquidated in bankruptcy (U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York case 05-140006).

The transaction will be completed through the debtor’s law firm Snow Becker Krauss in New York (www.sbklaw.com).  The law firm will hold the payment in escrow until a bill of sale is executed and the domain is transferred to the new owner (eBay ID - discountramps).

If you ask me, the sale was a hurried one and the domain could have fetched much more, at least One Million USD, had the law firm made it a longer auction and publicized it a little as well. What do you say, guys?

WikiLeaks gets a new lease at life!

At least, better sense and justice prevail!

A federal judge on Friday allowed whistle-blower site WikiLeaks to resume operation in the United States, a week after ordering its U.S.  hosting company and domain registrar to shut down and lock the renegade’s site from the internet.

The judge conceded the futility of attempts to censor information, in this instance private banking records, after it has been posted to the internet.

The judge signed an order last week that effectively took down the WikiLeaks site in the United States and also locked the WikiLeaks.org domain name to prevent transfer of the domain name to a different domain registrar.

- Wired.com

For those who came in late, WikiLeaks is a true whistle-blower website that published thousands of leaked documents. The web site was ordered to be taken offline in America after a suit was filed against the site posting allegedly stolen documents containing individuals’ banking records. The documents suggested that a Cayman Islands branch of a Swiss bank was helping customers practice money laundering and tax evasion across the globe.

Now, the banks in Switzerland must be getting the jitters as the pressure on them to be more transparent will be increased!

Network Solutions Gets kicked in the butt!

Yeah, I have been waiting for this and was hoping it’d happen soon!

Network Solutions has been sued for its holier-than-though policy of reserving domain names a potential buyer searched for on its website, practically disabling the poor guy to register it anywhere else but with Network Solutions at a price higher than other registrars.

Being a victim myself, I was hoping that it would happen real soon. Had I been a US resident, I’d have done it myself! The bozos thought that they had a good little scam running that nobody would blow the whistle on. Now, as I rub my hands with glee… I wish I could see the guys squirming in their seats with a potential PR nightmare at hands… something not even a seasoned public relations professional would be able to get them out of!

For those who came in late, please read the heads-up on the practice of Network Solutions at DomainTools.com

Here’s the excerpt.

I am confirming that Network Solutions steals domain ideas when people check domain availability on the Network Solutions website. They seem to have started the practice of stealing domain ideas on December 16th 2007 according to our Domain History database but I was just made aware of this practice today. I am appalled at the concept of taking people’s domain ideas and registering it before the consumer has the ability to manually register the domain.It is a deplorable action that Network Solution would announce potential domain names to the entire world. If a customer chooses not to register the domain name with Network Solution they are forced to wait 4 days for Network Solutions to delete the domain name in the Free Add Grace period. After the four day hostage period the consumer is free from the hostage situation and can register the domain somewhere else. However Network Solutions has now exposed those domains to Domain Tasters that will snipe those domain up milliseconds after Network Solutions deletes them. By registering the domain Network Solutions is exposing the domain in the DNS and every computer in the world now knows about the domain. These domains are now easy fodder for scammers and it is mind blowing that Network Solutions would expose their customers queries to the world in this manner.

- DomainTools

Their strategy was as good as those of the lowly domain tasters and try to profit from people’s ideas and that too on an automated basis. What a bunch of creeps!