July 2006
You are currently browsing the articles from WhoisIreland Review written in the month of July 2006.
The magnitude of EURid’s decision to sue 400 phantom registrars for breach of contract is only just becoming apparent. In order to become a .eu registrar, an up-front fee of 10000 Euros had to be paid. This entitled a registrar to register 1000 .eu domains before topping up. With 400 registrars each paying 10000 Euros each, that’s 4 Million Euros. The phantom registrars could, theoretically have registered 400,000 .eu domains. That’s a significant part of the .eu gTLD. However EURid has put only 74K of Ovidio Limited’s domains on hold. This means that either the Ovidio owners distributed the domains over these registrars or more domains have yet to be dealt with.
However other phantom registrars still exist and action has not been taken against them yet. No doubt EURid’s legal department is examining their cases. Taking action against them will only serve to increase the credibility of the .eu gTLD.
Some of the domains that Ovidio Limited warehoused are now due for release in August. They appear to be political party domains.
Tags: IrishBlogs,.EU, Ovidio Limited, Ovidio, Domains, .eu Fiasco, Internet Statistics, Eurid, Cyberwarehousing, domainnames
Written by John McCormac on July 25th, 2006 with 1 comment.
Read more articles on Domains And Statistics.
A press release on EURid’s site confirms the details. EURid has suspended 74K domains and has sued 400 registrars for breach of contract. The move was, according to EURid:
“prompted by abusive behavior from a syndicate of registrars who have systematically acquired domain names with the obvious intent of selling them. In the domain name business this is called warehousing and is not permitted.”
There was a clear and persistent pattern of abusive registration by a syndicate of bogus registrars who were acquiring .eu domains for the purpose of reselling them. In effect this was a cyberwarehousing operation on a massive scale. Among those front companies named in the press release were Ovidio Limited, Fausto Limited and Gabino Limited. EURid stated that the registrars and the registrants were the same - something that had been pointed out to EURid repeatedly over the last few months. This was clearly against the rules:
“Since registrars should only register domain names for existing customers and not “warehouse” the names in order to resell them at a higher price, this is clearly in breach of the registrar contract,” says Herman Sobrie, Legal Manager of EURid.”
Pending a court decision, EURid apparently would like to make these squatted domains available for registration again. However there are still hundreds more bogus registrars that have to be dealt with yet.
Tags: IrishBlogs,.EU, Ovidio Limited, Ovidio, Domains, .eu Fiasco, Internet Statistics, Eurid, Cyberwarehousing, domainnames
Written by John McCormac on July 24th, 2006 with 2 comments.
Read more articles on Domains And Statistics.
EURid placed over 73K .eu domains on hold. The domains are believed to be related to the cyberwarehousing operation Ovidio Limited. Ovidio Limited has been registering thousands of generic keyword .eu domains since the landrush in April. Many of these domains are parked on SEDO. The WHOIS data for Ovidio Limited domains has an address in Cyprus.
The Ovidio Limited website claims that
“Ovidio Limited owns a portfolio of domain names and operates corresponding websites. Through these sites it offers product and service information to direct navigation and other customers. Ovidio Limited uses advanced proprietary techniques to identify appropriate domain names for its portfolio and seeks to avoid the registration of domain names in respect of which third parties may have conflicting prior rights.”
On 19/07/2006, the number of .eu domains with a Cyprus address was 85767. On 20/07/2006 the number of Cyprus registered .eu domains was 12188. The massive drop of 73579 domains could have been caused by the Ovidio Limited domains being put on hold by EURid. Checking a number of known Ovidiolimited.com domains on the EURid WHOIS showed that every one from a somewhat limited sample (due to EURid’s 100 query per day restriction) had an “ON HOLD” status.
Ovidio’s own .eu domain, Ovidio.eu also has an “ON HOLD” status. The address given for the registrant is: Ovidio Limited, 4 Pikioni Street, 3075 Limassol, Cyprus. Approximately 45K .eu domains potentially associated Ovidio Limited were detected in a recent .eu statistical survey carried out by WhoisIreland.com in June 2006.
Cyprus is relatively small in terms of a gTLD footprint. It has approximately 5000 associated com/net/org/biz/info domains. However the drop of some 73579 .eu domains within 24 hours seems to indicate that EURid might be taking action. The big question now is whether other bogus registrar operations, many run by US and Canadian firms via EU registered front companies, will be next. Or will EURid melt like a lump of Belgian choclate that’s been left in the sun too long and allow such massive cyberwarehousing and cybersquatting operations in .eu gTLD to persist?
Tags: IrishBlogs,.EU, Ovidio Limited, Ovidio, Domains, .eu Fiasco, Internet Statistics, Eurid, Cyberwarehousing, domainnames
Written by John McCormac on July 23rd, 2006 with 6 comments.
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Searchtheowl , the search engine that reinvented itself as a directory seems to have gotten more facts wrong. A post on the Searchtheowl blog really proved that Mike Russen still does not have a clue about the size of the Irish web.
The truth is is in the world scale Ireland comes around 49th in the world for the rankings for country domain names .ie 22,000.
As of today, there are 63118 .ie domains. So basically, Mike Russen thinks that there are almost three times less .ie domains than there really are. The last time the .ie ccTLD was at 22000 domains was in 2001. It is not difficult to find these domain statistics.
Russen gives the following reason for converting searchtheowl to a directory. It is somewhat offensive but it was probably meant in jest:
When you think that there are 4.5 million alcholics [sic] clinging to rock in the atlantic ocean, the question became “was it worth trying to help local business” - the answer a resounding NO! It became quite boring trying to explain things so gave up. Thats why we stopped searching Ireland.
I think that Russen found out the hard way that user submissions only work when there is sufficient traffic on a web directory. Beyond that, the process has to either involve a lot of people (like Dmoz) or be automated (as in the way that spiders crawl the web). And for a country level search engine the problems are compounded. With millions of new websites appearing every month, the country level search engine is faced with detecting the handful that might be relevant.
One of the most important aspects of country level search engine design is to have an idea of the size of the webspace that you intend to search. Otherwise you could end up like Searchtheowl - trying to spider what could be upwards of a 15 million page webspace with a php script on some budget shared hosting.
Tag: Irishblogs - Search - Irish Search Engines
Written by John McCormac on July 7th, 2006 with 7 comments.
Read more articles on Search Engines.