At the risk of incurring George's wrath and with the caveat that I am
VERY opposed to Verisign engaging in this practice, let me add the
following thought.
This is EXACTLY what the secondary market participants are doing right
now. The secondary market has evolved well away from buying names for
resale (although this certainly does happen and in large numbers) and
towards capturing large pools of names and monetizing the latent
traffic. The traffic occurs from either misspellings or from names that
used to have traffic and/or inbound links and were not renewed.
These are the names that are fought over today in the drop pool. These
are the people who are involved in, and generally opposed to (although
not all), WLS. My view on WLS has changed. I now see it solely as a
transfer of wealth from registrars and others who provide services
around dropped names to owners of links farms and Verisign. Not good,
but NOTHING to do with consumers and businesses other than those that
participate in this market.
The most lucrative misspellings and unrenwed names belong to, and will
continue to go to, the pros. Verisign is now trying to grab the rest.
The folks engaged in this behaviour are both inventive and creative.
They are fairly playing within the rules. It is the rules that are the
problem. There are now a huge number of registrar accreditations that
are used solely for acquiring dropped names. My gut says it is more than
half the accreditations. This is a distortion of the market (significant
in my opinion) that is the result of:
1. The lack of new tlds
2. The poor execution in the tlds already introduced and
3. Failure by ICANN to effectively regulate the registrar
sector/enforce the contracts.
I want these comments to be taken primarily as observations not
judgements. I also am very interested in seeing the debate on these
issues turn more towards long-term structure that is good for the
Internet and away from short-term self-interest. Pile on!
Regards
Elliot Noss
Swerve wrote:
> Hmm, Sept. 12. 2003
>
> Let me get this straight.
>
> so say my domain is jam.com
>
> a viewer types in jan.com
>
> if that domain doesn't exist, they go to some Verisign Conceptual
> Whorehouse?
>
> also, wondering if they could technically do the same thing, if a
> specific web page of mine is
>
> jam.com/home
>
> and the viewer types in jam.com/hobe
>
> would that type of 404 error page now be directed to Verisign?
>
> Either way, it is not the way things currently work. Server not found
> works very well.
>
> This move by Verisign is part of the hyperMonetization of Everything
> Everywhere at Every Moment. You will soon be charged for every word
> you think or will have pop ups sent to you psychically if you misspell
> a word in your own mind or spend too much time thinking with words
> that are someone elses trademark.
>
> Verisign must NOT implement this practice. I will join a Lawsuit to
> prevent this. This will negatively affect my businesses and projects
> that have been running under .com and .net domains.
>
> Large settlements have already been made in court against people who
> bought misspelled domain names and profited from them. This is the
> same thing, but only worse.
>
> Same idea for all other companies that control other name spaces.
> Verisign, Neustar and others should think again about fucking with
> the name space in this way.
>
> I just realized that Verisign already does this with .TV.
>
> Let's remember that Verisign doesn't own the .com and .net space, they
> just manage it.
>
> If these companies don't back down, then Icann should Strip them of
> their rights to run the space. Poor Verisign,... lost control of the
> .com/.net space. Boo Hoo.
>
> Swerve
>
> *Gosh darn, it is a beautiful morning.
>
>
>
>
> At 10:08 PM -0700 9/11/03, George Kirikos wrote:
>
>> Hi Matt,
>>
>> --- Matt Rudderham <matt@norex.ca> wrote:
>>
>>> Just incase anyone doesn't read Slashdot, this seems disturbing, if a
>>> user
>>> lands on a non-existant / deleted domain they will be given the
>>> opportunity
>>> to buy it from Verisign?
>>
>>
>> It's worse, they'll be monetizing the traffic via their own
>> pay-per-click search engine. So, if a client does a typo of your
>> domain, instead of seeing a standard error page, so they can retype it,
>> Verisign will instead rewrite the error codes at the DNS level to
>> instead point to its own website where your competitors or others can
>> buy ads and take your business, violating your trademark rights.
>>
>> See my longer comments on this issue a few days ago on the GA mailing
>> list at:
>>
>> http://gnso.icann.org/mailing-lists/archives/ga/msg00295.html
>>
>> Sincerely,
>>
>> George Kirikos
>> http://www.kirikos.com/
>
>
>
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