DomainTools Blog

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?

Advanced word at the ICANN meeting tonight in Lisbon just came in. I understand that the board has voted down the Dot XXX proposal tonight.  The board decided behind closed doors that the new TLD should not be added to the Internet root. It is a long standing tradition at ICANN to have the secret board meeting the night before the offical board meeting. ICANN skeptics and critics have been calling for more transparency for a long time, but ICANN continues closed meetings. The ICM Registry first applied for the Dot XXX domain back in 2000 and then reapplied in 2004 under the sponsored Top Level Domains (TLD) RFP. In June of 2005, the ICANN board determined that the Dot XXX application met all eligibility criteria for sponsorship and authorized ICANN staff to initiate contractual negotiations with ICM Registry. ICANN Board approved a final version of the agreement on August 1st 2005 and put the agreement on the agenda for a final vote for August 16.  Several news stories hit the press and the US government came out against the new Dot XXX. The vote was put on-hold and a huge politcal game played out for several months. According to Stuart Lawley the CEO of ICM Registry, Vint Cerf, the Chairman of the ICANN board, approached him in March of 2006 and said ICANN would still be able to “pull the rabbit out of the hat”. Dr. Cerf indicated he would vote for the agreement and that he thought the board had enough votes to approve the agreement.

In May 2006, a few months and plenty of political pressure later, the board voted the application down 9 to 5.  The ICM Registry knew Washington politics played a huge role in changing the vote count from January to May, so they filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Department of Commerce and the State Department requesting all records and emails regarding the Dot XXX proposal. ICM also filed a reconsideration request in May.  It took a while to be heard, but the staff came back, lead by Dr. Paul Twomey, and agreed that they would negotiate a new contract in exchange for ICM dropping the reconsideration request, which they did between October 2006 and January 2007. In January 2007, the new contract was posted and tomorrow the vote will be against the Dot XXX contract. The irony of the situation is that Dr. Twomey actual negotiated the contract but he is going to vote against it.

Breaking news also came in tonight while I was writing this story that that a US District Court in Columbia has held the Department of Commerce and the State have failed to justify withholding documents that reflect the US Government’s role in meddling with the ICANN process on Dot XXX.  ICM Registry hopes to confirm their suspicions that the US Government interfered and changed the vote of the board. Dr. Vint Cerf went on the record with the Press in Wellington, New Zealand, confirming he was going to vote for it.

Vint Cerf, the chairman of ICANN, addressed the Registrar Constituency today in Lisbon. He asked, “At what point should ICANN get involved with a zombie (AKA walking dead) registrar? A few years ago, it was clear that ICANN would get involved in a dead registrar situation, but the line has blurred since then.” To a room full of registrars, it is a question that puts registrars on the defensive, but in light of the RegisterFly situation, the registrars were interested in cooperating with ICANN in this brainstorming session. Protecting the registrants and their domain names is a primary concern and focus of the ICANN Lisbon meeting. During the discussion, the issue of proxy registrations and how they can actually hurt, rather than protect, the registrant was raised several times.

The mechanisms that ICANN could introduce to protect the registrant could involve asking registries to report to ICANN if a registrar is having funding issues. There are early warning signs and red flags, but ICANN is currently not monitoring these signals. The time it takes for a registrant to get responses from the registrar can also indicate the health of a registrar, but registrars are not interested in getting judged or graded by ICANN. ICANN requires registrars to escrow registrant data in its current contract, however this requirement has never been enforced. The RegisterFly situation has strengthened the resolve of ICANN to start enforcing this provision of the contract, however, proxy registrations information is not required to be escrowed for safe keeping.

ICANN is collecting feedback and ideas for the next month, so if you have feedback on changes they could make, I would encourage you to voice them to ICANN.

The ICANN meeting in Lisbon has started and there are a lot of issues being discussed. Elliot Noss, the President & CEO of Tucows, posted on their corporate blog an article titled “Questions to Ask Before You Pick Your Domain Name Registrar”. The ten bullet points that he covers are good questions that should be asked and, we would say, continued to be asked every year. The registration process changes over time and so do the policies of registrars, registries, and ICANN.

The important summary of the article is that a user should know how a domain expires at the registrar and how they get the domain back if it expires. It can be time consuming and is now getting increasingly difficult and costly to retrieve a domain past expiration. The next thing to consider is how portable the domains are – can you unlock them and move them? The transfer policy can be different at every registrar. Always use a registrar that offers the ability to auto-renew with a credit card or funding source. The user should be able to stop auto-renewal if they don’t want to hold on to a domain name, because some names are junk and aren’t worth renewing. Word of mouth about the registrar is good to check – ask people you trust or read blogs or news groups that discuss the registrar.

1. What is your primary business model?
2. Do you make transfers as easy as the rules allow?
3. Do you allow for easy locking/unlocking?
4. Do you make it easy to opt-out of auto-renewals?
5. Do you tie domains to your services?
6. Do you offer Whois privacy? What are your privacy policies in general?
7. What are your policies on compliance issues like litigation, ownership disputes and WDRP?
8. How easy is it to contact you?
9. What happens when my domain expires?
10. Are you a registrar or reseller?

The article is a good read and is heavily detailed about registration issues.

Name.com and its sister company, Spot Domains LLC, have been accused of violating the anit-cybersquating act by registering over 40 domain typos using the Neiman Marcus trademark. Neiman Marcus is seeking over $4,000,000+ in damages and also injunctive relief. Neiman Marcus just settled its earlier case with Dotster and it appears they are looking for more domain tasters to sink their teeth into. In the filings in U.S. District Court in Denver, they asked for $100,000 per domain. In our own research, it appears that Domain Tasters in 2002 were looking for generic words or phrases that they could monetize, but since then most of the viable words and phrases that could be monitized have been registered. Domain Tasters of 2007 aren’t finding a lot of generic words and phrases any more, however they are finding typos of famous brands that are monetizing well. For example, Well Fergo Bank.com was registered by a Domain Taster yesterday.

As part of the settlement with Dotster, they agree to stop registering names similar to Neiman Marcus. Dotster also agreed to suspended Domain Tasting, and I bet that Name.com will have to suspend Domain Tasting as part of its settlement too. At any given time, more then 5 million domains are tied up in Domain Tasting, however lawsuits have been bringing those numbers down. Maltuzi located in California is another Domain Taster that just got sued by Microsoft. The registrar for Maltuzi is Name King, and upon the Microsoft lawsuit, Name King suspended Domain Tasting for all its clients. Name King had facilated Domain Tasting for a few select customers.

Many Domain Tasters have been masking their whois or using shell companies to reduce their liability, but as we have seen in the Microsoft lawsuit, they name the defendants as unknown “John Does.” Lawyers use this type of lawsuits to obtain identities through subpoenas and then can sue the people they find.

I was talking with Frank Schilling of Name Administration earlier this month and he reported an odd behavior of Google. If a user types his domain Personal Loans.com directly into Google, it will not even show one result for his website PersonalLoans.com. I can understand if he had typed the keywords for the domain, but he used no spaces and completed it with a .COM at the end. So there should only be one match for his domain, right? Nope. Instead the user will see an Australian website Personal Loans.com.au as the first result. This other site shows up because it has the same string as him but has the .AU on the end.

I decided to study the situation more. I have a good background in SEO but I never consulted for another company. This analyzation is purely for fun and Mr Shilling doesn’t know I am doing it. Shilling is doing alright with type-in traffic, however he is loosing eyeballs when it comes to the search engines – they pretend he doesn’t exist. You know you are blacklisted when a user types your domain name into Google and nothing about it appears.

Here is a screenshot of the Google results:

PersonalLoans.com can’t be found at all since it is blacklisted at the moment. I am less concerned about the blacklist status and more concerned about the health of his organic traffic. Lets talk about getting the domain back into Google, but not just in – in the first ten results for Shilling’s keywords “Personal Loans”. Type-in traffic is alright but organic traffic is Gold.

• First, I would move the domain away from the group of 44,555 other domains sitting on the same server.
• Second, I would concentrate on content. He has done a good job at building out the site with useful information, however it looks like a parking wolf in website’s clothing. Can Google see that? Yes. We need to add more content and decrease the ads. Less ads can actually result in more income.
• Third, after the content is added, the hard job is getting some links to the site. Perhaps he could start a Personal Loans blog and talk about the personal loans process. The blog could interview authors of books and other blogs on the loan process. By actively engaging the readers of the site, it would draw in those much needed links.
• Fourth, Google is temporal. Sites that never change or get all their links at once don’t do very well. A site needs a track record of growth. Devote a few hours a week to looking at the site and figuring out ways to improving it.
• Fifth, link bait with some features. Offer charts, graphs or interactive calculators. People bookmark these and come back, so also add social network bookmarking widgets to each page. This enables users without websites or blogs to create backward links to the site.

A website is like a person- you know if they have a good soul in the first 2 seconds you meet them. I would say Google is very good at judging the character of a site and knows if it should be included. Google will continue to keep judging a site and will change its view over time. For example, DomainTools two years ago was a PR0 (the lowest page rank possible) and pointed to a porn site. I bought the domain and turned it around. Before beginning the project, Shilling needs to examine what makes the other sites in the top results rank so well. What are they doing that he could be doing better. The best way to beat the competition is to chart them out and see how beatable they are.

PersonalLoans.com has a lot of potential and it needs more inbound links and more attention. I like that it is two words – generic one word domains are often harder to help. The more words in the domain name and the most specific the phrase is, the easier it is to help a site.

Google just introduced a theme picker to their custom homepage. Users can choose one of 6 new themes or stay with the classic view. I decided to pick the bus stop theme because it looked nice. I picked the theme on a sunny day, so I had no idea what I was in for. Little did I know the image would change as the weather did. Because I am a Seattle native, I am constantly under attack from the rain. I look outside and it is cold and depressing. Now my homepage is cold and depressing. Hmmm, Thanks Google!

Wikipedia says, “Seasonal affective disorder is prevalent even in mid-latitude places with mild winters, such as Seattle.” It suggests light therapies as a cure, and I would suggest Google allows people to turn the rain off. I like snow in the winter, falling leafs in the autumn, and new growth in the spring, but rain should have an off switch. That bus stop should have some trees behind it so I can see the seasons changing. How about some flowers in the field too.

Domain Speculators don’t stay in if it is raining – they still go out and register domains. Google Decorative Themes.com was registered the same day Google launched their service by a company called Click Cons of all things. However, Google Theme.com had been taken for months before the service launched by someone else. It looks like Google is getting lazy at protecting their new services and their trademark.

The world is turning for us! Why is Microsoft crawling our website using Blogger.com as the referral string? Last time I checked Blogger.com was a domain that Google owned.

Here is an example line from our log file where we see this happened:

209.249.11.3 – - [21/Mar/2007:00:44:48 -0700] “GET /takeoutrestaurants.com HTTP/1.0″ 200 9624 “http://www.blogger.com/” “MSRBOT” whois.domaintools.com

To double check someone is not playing a trick on us I tracerouted the IP address.

traceroute to 209.249.11.3 (209.249.11.3), 64 hops max, 40 byte packets
1 66.249.16.130 (66.249.16.130) 0.545 ms 0.528 ms 0.487 ms
2 ip-64-246-162-161.ipd.CCOM.NET (64.246.162.161) 0.360 ms 0.965 ms 0.363 ms
3 19c1-18s1.sea.fibercloud.NET (216.145.30.158) 0.364 ms 0.348 ms 0.364 ms
4 19b1-19c1.sea.fibercloud.NET (216.145.30.142) 0.738 ms 0.476 ms 0.744 ms
5 GigabitEthernet4-0.GW7.SEA1.ALTER.NET (157.130.190.137) 0.510 ms 0.583 ms 0.366 ms
6 146.ATM2-0.XR2.SEA1.ALTER.NET (152.63.105.182) 0.736 ms 0.599 ms 0.616 ms
7 POS7-0.BR1.SEA1.ALTER.NET (152.63.105.21) 0.614 ms 0.473 ms 0.489 ms
8 204.255.169.106 (204.255.169.106) 0.990 ms 1.102 ms 1.490 ms
9 so-2-2-2.mpr1.sjc2.us.above.net (64.125.28.182) 35.468 ms 27.212 ms 27.221 ms
10 so-4-0-0.mpr3.pao1.us.above.net (64.125.28.221) 27.841 ms 27.835 ms 27.967 ms
11 * * *

Looks like it goes to above.net just before it gets caught by a firewall. I looked at the whois record for the IP address, it points to Microsoft and the IP address has been swipped to them from above.net. So everything checks out.

I then ran a reverse DNS query on the IP address and I got the host: msrbot-rtr01.msrbot.net.

I then ran the forward DNS on the Host “msrbot-rtr01.msrbot.net” and it resolved back to the above.net again. Different IP address but same datacenter Ip address provider. I wish Microsoft as a whole would follow the verification process they said they were going to use. It is not hard to nail down reverse DNS and then forward DNS to verify that a bot belongs to a company. Either someone in above.net datacenter is pretending to be Microsoft or this is the real deal. My bet is that this is Microsoft Research and they don’t follow the same protocols as corporate.

;; ANSWER SECTION:
msrbot-rtr01.msrbot.net. 83145 IN A 209.66.91.13

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
msrbot.net. 83145 IN NS ns0.directnic.com.
msrbot.net. 83145 IN NS ns1.directnic.com.

But looking at the Name Server, I see Microsoft is using Directnic for is DNS. Why would Microsoft Research use a Registrar’s DNS servers if Microsoft has their own corporate name server. Well, I guess they are far enough away from Redmond they don’t have the password or something to the corporate DNS server. The whois record on the bots reverse host name is msrbot.net and shows Microsoft Research in Mountain View, CA.

I am very perplexed, why is Microsoft Research crawling around the web using Blogger.com as the referral string!

 UPDATE: We emailed Microsoft Research about the bot. This is the response we received back from them.

—–Original Message—–
From: Dennis Fetterly [mailto:*********@microsoft.com]
Sent: Thursday, March 22, 2007 2:53 PM
To: Jay Westerdal
Subject: RE: Help on your crawler

Jay,

As you know, the referring URL just indicates which URL the crawler was visiting when it discovered the link to a page on your site.  It is strange that so many requests for pages on your site are showing up with a referral of www.blogger.com.  I’m looking into it; thanks for the report.

Cheers,
-Dennis

—————————-

UPDATE: As of today, MSRBOT has crawled 9,487 pages all with the same referral string. http://www.blogger.com/

I just don’t buy that the main page of blogger had a link to 9,487 pages on our site. I have to call it like it is, the MSRBot has something broken with it. Also, robots don’t crawl using a referral string traditionally.

Got an idea for a new company? Well don’t be so quick to check if the domain name is available. Rogue companies are out there stealing domain research. The act of typing the domain name in the wrong place may allow these squatters to register the domain before you. Here is how these companies spy on people and some good tips to avoiding them.

We have been investigating domain name research theft crimes for the last two years and talking with the many victims. If you are a victim, please contact us – the more technical a description of the event the better. We are collating events of all the victims and we will update everyone if there is a common thing to avoid. We will also be passing our evidence on to local authorities in the proper jurisdictions. Name Intelligence/DomainTools has many three letter government agencies and large law firms that use our whois service and users can be 100% guaranteed that research done on our web sites will not get shared with third parties. We still want to share some tips so that domain owners are more aware.

Top Tips:

• Avoid address bar guessing.
• Avoid search engines that don’t make a billion dollars a year in revenue.
• Avoid browser plug-ins that send data back to the Internet.
• Go directly to trusted registrars and whois companies.

Address bar guessing
It is such a strong urge to type the domain name into the address bar and see what website comes up. Most users think perhaps there is already a company using the name and this will be a quick end to the question. Wrong! This is the most dangerous thing to do. Internet Service Providers (ISP) sell NXD data. You may be asking yourself “What is NXD data and how does that effect my domain research?” Non-eXistent Domain (NXD) Data is a response the DNS system tells the asking computer if resolution on an IP address fails because the domain doesn’t exist. Yes, ISPs sell this data. I personally talked with a representative that gave me her business card and quoted me a six figure number for access to their NXD data. These domain name research companies actually buy this data and register those domains to see what generates money. Their hope is that if people at one ISP represent 1/5000th of the Internet, they might receive 5000 visitors a month from all the other ISPs around the world according to that ratio. So by testing a theory with DNS, people are telling these companies what domains to ‘taste’. Ironically, this type of behavior will have a chilling effect on direct navigation which actually hurts the domain parking industry as a whole.

Avoid non-billion dollar search engines
Datamining firms have struck deals with smaller search engines and meta search engines. These companies are looking for more revenue, and revealing what people are searching for is one of their revenue sources. I love when I see search engines like Google stick their neck out and tell the US Government that not even Uncle Sam can have access to user’s search data. To sum this up, don’t trust search engines that don’t have a privacy policies that protects user’s data from being turned over to third parties. And even then, don’t type domains into search engines. Search Engines are for ideas and concepts, the address bar is for REGISTERED domains.

Excerpt from WordTracker.com

“We compile a database of terms that people search for … we tell you how often people search for them…“

Excerpt from HitWise.com

“Hitwise has developed proprietary software that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) use to analyze website usage logs created on their network. The anonymous data sent to Hitwise from the ISPs include a range of industry standard metrics relating to the viewing of websites including page requests, visits and average visit length. Hitwise also combines this rich ISP data with a worldwide opt-in panel to overlay demographic, lifestyle and transactional behavior across the thousands of websites that are reported on every day.“

Browser plug-ins
For any browser plug-in that is free, ask yourself why is it free and whether they send data back to a server. Avoid software on computers that reports data back to the Internet. Of course this is the most obvious advice, but I need to mention it. The likelihood of someone datamining domain name research from spyware is small. If they have spyware on your computer, it’s more likely they are going after credit cards numbers and social security numbers instead of domain research.

Trusted Whois Websites
I have interviewed the CEOs and CTOs of many large registrars. Tim Ruiz, the CTO of GoDaddy, has assured me they have never once abused their position and they would fire any employee caught abusing data inside their company. Pat Kane, the Director of Business Operations of Verisign, has told me they can’t even log their servers because the log files would fill up too fast and the data wouldn’t be valuable unless they sell it. Since Verisign is a public company, they may sell the data in the future but they currently don’t because ISPs can do it better, and the ISPs sample sizes are large enough. It is just too costly to gather, and Verisign would need to file a service plan with ICANN before would be allowed to sell data like this. Paul Stahura, the President of eNom, has told me they don’t allow datamining either.

DomainTools.com is a division of Name Intelligence, and I, Jay Westerdal, the President and CEO of the Name Intelligence, have a strict policy against domain name research theft. People’s queries are never used to register domain names, period. I serve as the secretary of the ICANN Registars Consistency, and although we are not a tiny company, we are still a relatively small company. We enjoy building tools for Domainers and anyone seeking more knowledge about domains.

Closing thoughts
There are very few companies that register over 50K domains a day just to perform Domain Name Tasting on them. I have no problem with Domain Tasting, but I do have a problem with tasting other people’s ideas right before they were about to register them. If companies are going to Domain Taste, they should generate the domain names from computer algorithms and not from mining queries. As a footnote, Moniker and Pool.com offer such a service commercially for a small price and actually market it as the poor Domainers chance to taste too. Yes, you too can taste domains for 5 days at 5 cents a domain. There are only a handful of companies that are actually Domain Tasters. Most of these companies hide/shield their identities by setting up Whois Proxy services or setting up paper companies. However, only registrars can effectively perform domain tasting, so it is easy to guess who they are without looking at the whois most of the time.

Since we started our blog a month ago, I have received a few questions about reading our blog. Blogs are new to most people, webpages are not. Many people don’t know about the difference between a blog and a regular webpage because they look the same and they are both webpages. Yes, a blog is a web page. However, a blog goes beyond a normal web page – it is designed to be delivered to the reader even when they do not visit the site. Think of a blog as a newspaper column. Traditionally, newspapers get delivered by a delivery person whereas blogs get delivered by email and RSS. RSS is short for Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication, but it really is an XML file (a file that a computer can read). XML files stay updated and RSS Reader software can grab these files every 30 minutes or so. If there is new information in the RSS feed, then it gets shown to the user. If a user subscribes to several feeds, he is basically building his own newspaper. The user picks the columnist that he would like to read and his/her feeds get automatically folded into the RSS Reader.

Most users of DomainTools do not subscribe to our blog even though they are active readers, so we have added an RSS Title preview to all WHOIS pages. This enables our users to stay current on what we have written without having to subscribe. If they do not visit DomainTools on a daily basis, then they are more likely to subscribe. However, we did not stop there. What if you are looking at a WHOIS record for a domain with an RSS feed? Well, we now display the headlines from those sites directly on the whois record for the domain.

Take a look at a few domains that have RSS feeds and notice RSS headline integration. We plan to update sites that have RSS feeds more frequently in the future as well. Currently, it is a weekly update process for all feeds with the exception of feeds that update daily. In the future we will update those sites daily or hourly depending on the rate of change.

• CNN.com
• NY Times.com
• Wired.com
• Time.com
• DIGG.com
• Mozilla.org
• WSJ.com

Webmasters should be adding their blog feed into their webpages so that users, search engines, and DomainTools can find the sites blog. Just insert a tag like the following in the Head section of the HTML:
<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”RSS 2.0″ href=”http://blog.domaintools.com/feed/” />

We asked the question, “how many domains have an RSS feed?” In search of the answer to this question, we crawled all the domains we know about (80 million or so) and found that a small fraction of domains have self discoverable RSS feeds – just under 3%. Most bloggers and domain owners aren’t even aware of the self discovery features built into RSS. Webmasters can let browsers and web agents alert their human users of an available feed on the page they are viewing. In this example, the user is on the CNN webpage where the RSS icon has appeared, indicating that they have an RSS feed. The user would then just click on the icon and add it to his/her RSS Reader.

RSS Auto Discovery

Every morning I read RSS feeds from around the Internet. It is much more relaxing than reading a newspaper and I get to choose every columnist. If someone gets off topic or their blog goes away from the original concept, then I just hit the unsubscribe button…or make a comment to tell the writer what I really think of his article. I use Google Reader to stay current on all the feeds I subscribe to. If you know of more then 3 blogs, it may be time to pick an RSS Reader and start to read those blogs using a Reader. Using a Reader is very efficient because it saves time from having to visit web pages to check for updates – especially for blogs that don’t update very often. If a blogger only gives me partial feeds, then I tend to unsubscribe. Publishers want page visits, but they should be happy I am reading. Tracking page views is so 2004 – it is really about how many humans read the stories. If the author of the site wants/needs to track how many people read his/her feed, they can watch the number of downloads for their blog.

For RSS Readers, I suggest Google Reader but there are a lot to chose from. If a user uses more then one computer, then using an AJAX RSS Reader is the best route. If the user only reads one blog, then I suggest email delivery.

Google Reader