DomainTools announced today on their blog that the Aftermarket.com auction will feature several New Orleans themed gift packages that will be auctioned along with the domain names today. Proceeds from the auction of these three items will be donated to New Orleans Habitat for Humanity. The auction p...

Domain registrar Godaddy.com recently announced sponsorship of the Head’s Up Poker Tournament in Las Vegas, March 6-8. Godaddy sponsors a lot of events and athletes so that news isn’t all that interesting. What is interesting to DNN is the shopping spree Godaddy went on to protect their...

Verizon recently filed two cases against domain owners claiming trademark infringement. The first case was filed in California federal court(PDF).  The second case was was filed recently in a Virginia federal court (PDF). DNN was tipped off that Verizon had started the California case in an unusual...

Not getting anywhere with domain name support ?  Why not enlist the help of your friends and associates on a social media platform and go after the company directly ? Christian Van Der Herst recently had his email address at Gmail.com Godaddy account compromised by a hacker. According to Christian,...

How ironic is this ? Guests checking in online at the Hollywood Renaissance hotel were greeted with a familiar website today.  The domain name RenaissanceHollywood.com expired on January 19, 2009. Nice work guys! (c) 2009 DomainNameNews.com NameDrive is introducing 6 new innovative templates. ...

According to the company website and other reports on the web, registrar Network Solutions experienced a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack today that brought down it’s DNS services.  Any website using DNS services or hosting from NSI could have been down as a result of the attack. ...

The Executive Director of the Internet Commerce Association (ICA), Michael Collins announced his resignation today. The resignation letter emailed to supporters explains Collins desire to work on his own business ventures. The ICA is a non profit group organized to lobby on behalf of domain name ow...

Company sources confirm that direct navigation company Sendori.com has been acquired by Ask.com sponsored listings.  Specific details of the transaction were not provided. Sendori.com provides a unique service in the domain space. Rather than parking domain names on a page with search listings the...

According to the official Google blog, 100 Google HR positions were recently eliminated. Although minor in the scheme of things (Google lists roughly 20,000 employees as of September 2008) this move gives a clear sign that the company is scaling back.  The Google post also references the recent cut...

Good news. If you missed the TRAFFIC Down Under conference last year, you now have a chance to catch all of the content online.  Fabulous has put all of the presentations online at the TRAFFIC Down Under site (works best in IE). It’s great to see the content of these presentation available fo...

In our previous post about the news that Verizon had won a default judgment against domain registrar OnlineNic, we pointed out an important fact in the case. The registrar OnlineNic is a owned by a Chinese company.  The company is listed on the ICANN list of registrars as a US based registrar and r...

In a fashion reminiscent of investment pump and dump scams, domain sellers list domain names for sale and pump cheap traffic to the names to make them look appealing and then dump the names on unsuspecting buyers.  These scammers list domains for sale on domain aftermarkets that advertise the infla...

UPDATE :  MysteryDomainAuction.com has been taken down by the owner.  All money has been refunded to bidders. John Motson, the domainer behind DnXpert.com and the ebook Domaining Manifesto has concocted a new domain auction site with a twist that should get people talking. The recipe?  Take 1 hig...

Chris Dannen of FastCompany blogged his thoughts on the pending release of new TLDs . Dannen feels that the release of the new domain extension will spur a rebirth of cybersquatting.  Too bad Dannen, like many others, has bought in to the idea that cybersquatting equals buying and selling domain na...

According to the Miami Herald, bodybuilder Steven Thiele, has been found liable of cyber-piracy and trademark dilution.  He was ordered to pay $3000 plus legal fees.  Thiele had previously demanded the Indian tribe pay $500,000 each for the domain names miccosukeetribeofindiansofflorida.com, micco...

It was previously reported that LiveDeal.com sold YP.com to Yellowpages.com.  SEC filings by LiveDeal.com reveal that the recent sale of the YP.com website brought a sale price of $3.85 million. Our divestiture of our Internet property “www.yp.com” could adversely impact our revenues. On Novemb...

Government watchdog JudicialWatch posted an article today declaring the domain name Change.gov, the location of U.S. President-elect Barack Obama’s newest website may have been illegally granted.  According to the site, Obama’s team initially requested and was denied use of the domain n...

Days after our post that social media user names are becoming more like domain names, an issue over a Twitter user name has piqued the interest of an internet heavy-weight.  According to a seesmic post from Kevin Rose, creator of Digg.com,  Social media company Room214 has requested that the user,...

According to Businesss Week and other sources, Verizon has won a legal battle against registrar OnlineNic in a default judgement. The decision awarded Verizon $50,000 per domain name (663 in total).  Andrew at DomainNameWire points out that this is one of several cases Verizon has brought up agains...

Some of the more outspoken veterans of the domain name business like to think of themselves as early adopters, likely because of their early awareness and insight into the power of domain names.  However, for most domainers this early adoption of one particular form of naming has not carried over t...

In writing a previous post equating user names on social media sites to domain names, it raised my curiousity what big brands were up to on Twitter.  It’s understandable in the early 1990’s, as the internet was slowly emerging, brand managers and/or executives couldn’t see the pot...

In the spring of 2007, Steve Poland wrote the article “Twitter Usernames Are Like Domains in 1995″. As the popularity of the microblogging service grows, more and more evidence of the similarities seem to be recognizable.  Poland points out Twitter usernames are one-of-a-kind — an...

The US Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration sent a letter to ICANN expressing concern over the plans to introduce new TLDs. In the letter, the US DOC expresses concern that ICANN is moving forward with the proposal to introduce new TLDs without gi...

In a case that is well over a year old, Vulcan Golf and other plaintiffs in the “Vulcan vs Google” case where handed a set back this week as the court denied their class certification.  The court’s decision can be found at this link on Docutek (pdf).  DNN caught wind of this news...

Google announced today that they have extended their Adsense for Domains to all publishers. Although, the program is being opened to all publishers, Google will continue to monitor compliance. The Adsense Blog states that the program will be rolled out to North American English-speaking markets firs...