iEstates.com

According to an email I just received from UnitedDomains.com a Registrar, ICM yesterday:

“Yesterday all failed Sunrise applications were released to the public for registration.

A”pplicants who did not have successful Sunrise applications can attempt to register active and blocked domain names.”

“Members of the Sponsored Community who did not qualify for the Sunrise period also have a shot at registering these highly sought after domain names.”

I contacted ICM who said there they haven’t published or furnished a list of these domains that failed and are now available for registration so I guess you just have to try and see if a domain you previously wanted is available.…

In the ongoing lawsuit that Manwin filed against ICM Registry and ICANN over the .XXX TLD,  the parties today entered into a joint stipulation that allows Manwin to file an amended complaint by January 17th and gives ICM 60 days to file a response to the complaint.

You may remember that ICM filed motions to dismiss the case filed by Manwin, the  operator of adult sites such as YouPorn.com in January and the Court scheduled a hearing on the motions for April 2, 2012.

Included in the documents filed in the court today is a stipulation that the hearing will be taken off the court’s calendar for now.

Moreover the stipulation indicates that the parties are in settlement talks which could end the matter,  or some of the issues in the case:

“”In addition, in recent days, Plaintiffs and ICM have engaged in discussions aimed at resolving the disputes that are the subject of this litigation.”"

“The parties believe that additional time would potentially allow the parties to resolve all or some portion of their dispute”

“”The Parties hereby stipulate that Defendants shall have 60 days from the filing of the amended Complaint to file an answer, motion or other response thereto.”

“By continuing the response date for the amended Complaint for 60 days, the parties will be able to focus their energies on these efforts, and avoid unnecessarily expending the parties’ and the Court’s resources.”

We will keep you updated on this case.

According to a report in hawaiinewsnow.com,  one domain name registration, universityofhawaii.xxx, has the University of Hawaii asking legislators to toughen laws to make it easier to go after website operators who “fraudulent use domain names.

In a story a couple of days ago the University of Hawaii (UH)  is none to happy that someone registered universityofhawaii.xxx and put up some porn on the domain and is trying to sell the domain name on eBay.com for $100K.

The UH has already threatening the porn web site operator with legal action if it doesn’t stop using the school’s name as its domain name and has given the site until Friday to stop using its name or the university has threatened to file a suit a federal suit.

Now “UH wants lawmakers to consider amending a bill on unauthorized computer use to include fraudulent use of Internet domain names.”

“We believe that individuals who willfully and purposely attempt to profit through misleading the public by misrepresenting governmental organizations should also be held accountable as the wrongdoers they are,” wrote University of Hawaii President M.R.C. Greenwood in written testimony to the State Senate Committee on Economic Development and Technology.”

“The committee’s chair, State Sen. Carol Fukunaga, said Wednesday she planned to work with the university to amend the bill to incorporate UH officials’ concerns.”

“One approach might be to update Hawaii’s decade-old statutes on ‘cybersquatting’ to include the fraudulent use of domain names, such as the kind of malicious representation we are now seeing.”

“I think it’s important to us that people who try to besmirch us don’t get to do it without some penalty,” Greenwood said.

It would be yet another attempt by the state to regulate the Internet.

However there is an old saying in the legal profession that basically says bad facts make bad law.

In this case, it could only take one domain name registration for a state to impose criminal and/or civil sanctions on those who register domain names.

 …

With hundreds of new right of the dot, gTLD extensions being applied for, I though I would take a look at the most recent extension, .XXX and see what effect it was having on the traffic of XXX.com

According to Compete.com traffic on XXX.com has doubled since the launch of the .XXX extension in December.

According to Compete XXX.com had around 100K visitors a month, each month for 2011 up until November the month that Sunrise and LandRush applications were due.

In December when .XXX officially launched traffic on XXX.com doubled to over 200,000 Visitors according to Compete.com

I know a lot of domainers believe that there will be a substantial amount of traffic leakage to the a matching .com to a new gTLD extension.

In case your wondering, it appears XXX.net got no such boost according to Compete.com

XXX.co also saw a doubling in traffic in  but it still gets under 1K visitors a month according to Compete.com

We will have to keep an eye on this,  but for holders of great generics or geo’s .com’s which may become its own extension in the next few years, it looks like they may have a lot of extra traffic to look forward to.

…

According to Afilias the company that provides the back-end operations for the .XXX registry, .XXX broke 200,000 domain names under management today.

According to the report I received,  .XXX now has 200,295 domain names in the system.

According to Registrarstats.com there are only 110K domain in the root.

I reached out to Stuart Lawley CEO of ICM registry which operates the .XXX registry to ask about the why the numbers reported by Alifias differ so drasticlly differ from RegistrarStats.com numbers:

“”Names that are NOT in the zone file are names without any associated name servers ( as in all TLDs) and in our case the names may have name servers but the ” membership token” has not been issued by us yet or has not been ” associated” with the names at Registrar level.”"

So domains under management but not added to the Root would include those registered under the TM blocking period, those domains that are subject to a Land Rush or Sunrise action which are still ongoing, and those reserved or restricted by the registry.

We know the registry reserved some 1,400 premium domain names.

We also know that ICM reserved thousands of domain names of celebrities and politically sensitive domains so that they could not be registered.

My guess is there are around 60K+ blocked domains or domains purchased by companies or institutions that just wanted to protect someone else from registering a matching .xxx domain.

However and to be perfectly  clear,  that is just my guess, based on the number of domains under management compared to the domains in the root taking into account the land rush/ Sunrise  auctions, domains reserved and restricted by the registry and the domains that are registered but still aren’t associated with a membership token.

All registries file monthly reports with ICANN but when I check yesterday the lastest reports on ICANN sites were for September, which is no help with .XXX since the extension didn’t launch until December.

According to Stuart Lawley the CEO of the ICM registry the company that operates the .XXX TLD, there has been a sale in a Sunrise or Landrush auction for a .XXX domain name into the six figures

According to Mr. Lawley comment made on thedomains.com to a post, the landrush or Sunrise auction wound up at $121K.

Although Mr. Lawley did not identify the domain name, he gave a clue:

“”First wave of auctions closed , highest auction figure for closed auction was yesterday , eight character name for $121,000

Next wave of announcements coming soon”

Mr. Lawley also states that there are now  over 198,000 .XXX domains under management since launch and 110,000 since December 6th.

$121K For a .XXX closed auction is certainly a nice sale.

I will be interesting to see what the domain is once its announced.

The highest closed auction I have on my board is CamChat.xxx which closed at just over $5K

Yesterday I saw the sale of the domain name Sexy.org cross the Sedo.com wire for a mere $7,500.

Ouch.

Sexy is without a doubt a great word for an adult or semi adult site.

Its right below words like sex and porn and certainly well above 2% of the value of those words.

It was just a few years ago that both sex.net and porn.net sold well into the six figures $425K and $350K if memory serves.

At $7,500 Sexy.org well to say the least was a good buy, unless the existence of the .XXX extension has taken a lot of juice out of non .com adult domains.

Its impossible to make a call on just one domain but the price of $7,500 for Sexy.org is pretty shocking and it could well be related to the existence of the .XXX. extension.

If so, as the new gTLD’s roll out it could be a wake up call for other non.com’s in verticals that will have new gTLD’s

For example will a domain like Maineattorney.org be worth the same as it is now once there is a .law extension?

Will NewYorkPizza.org or .net be worth as much once there is a .NYC and maybe a .pizza?

The auctions for Sunrise/Land Rush .XXX domain names started today.

An auction was scheduled if more than 1 application was submitted either during the Sunrise or Land Rush period for the same .XXX domain.

I do not believe ICM, the company that runs the .XXX Registry, has ever released a statement as to how many of domain names are in such auctions.

At Worldwide Media, Inc. we are in 96 of these auctions so we should have a pretty good idea of how they are going.

The auctions are all handled by Pool.com and like the .Co and .Me auctions the closing time will be extended in the event a bid is placed within a day of the closing date.

For now the first auctions end on January 10th 2012

Cnet.com just published an article about .XXX domain names chatting about what domain names were taken and which are still available.

The problem is the article is incorrect.

The article entitled “These .XXX domains are ready to Hook Up”

The article cites such domains like Alabama.xxx and Nashville.xxx “are available to be registered for $100 a year”.

However they are not.

Before we blame the author of the report or the reporter, it looks like ICM could have done a better job on its whois reporting.

If you use the whois command off the Apple terminal lets call it the raw whois data (that is how I typically check the whois) those domain name show as “not taken”,  but if you check the ICM Registry whois directly, you will see both domains are pending in either a sunrise or land rush auction.

If you check the ICM site’s whois this is the message you get:

This name will be awarded after an auction.
Click xxxauctions.pool.com for more information”

As you know if there was more than one application was submitted during either the Sunrise or Land Rush period the domain goes to an auction.

However apparently whois on certain programs are returning a false positive.

The cnet.com article goes on to list hundreds of other domains that appear to be available, including Cornell.xxx and Salon.xxx just to name a couple more so many of the domains that appear to be available are not and are awaiting auction.