October 2006
You are currently browsing the articles from WhoisIreland Review written in the month of October 2006.
Ultsearch.com and mostwanteddomains.com are active in .eu ccTLD. With the recent court order by a Belgian court, it seems that “direct navigation” networks have gained some element of legitimacy in .eu ccTLD. The Ovidio syndicate managed to convince the court that it was not a warehousing operation but rather a direct navigation network. These “direct navigation” networks rely on type-in traffic and just serve pages of PPC adverts to users landing on the pages.
A number of these link are already operating within the .eu ccTLD and EURid has not taken any action against them. Some of the biggest players in the US market are active in the .eu ccTLD. They have used front companies to register hundreds of thousands of .eu domains for their networks. EURid seems completely obvlivious to the way that these firms have bought up huge swathes of .eu ccTLD in order to turn them into PPC linkswamps.
Marchex bought the Hong Kong Ultsearch.com operation some time ago. Recent research shows that ultsearch.com it has over 3493 .eu domains hosted and it picked up transfers from tempusenterprises.com in the last few months. Some of those Ultsearch domains are registered by what appears to be an Irish front company. In the past few months, ultsearch.com gained some domains from the Tempus Enterprises Limited (another UK front company) nameservers.
Michael Berkens’ mostwanteddomains.com has also been busy. His UK front companies have snagged at least 532 .eu domains but it failed to get malls.eu despite a Benelux trademark.
Another “direct navigation” network that used UK front companies (apparently Swiss owned) has over 43371 .eu domains hosted on Romanian hoster xss.ro and in Romanian IP space. This operation has registered domains such as waterfordcastle.eu, creativeireland.eu and historyireland.eu eventhough it has no connection with Ireland. It is quite plainly a squatter that has registered the .eu variant of many existing website domains.
The damage to .eu ccTLD of having so much of .eu turned into PPC pages is quite obvious to everyone but the management of EURid. Now the .eu ccTLD is little more than a pale imitation of .info or .biz gTLDs. Any registrations by businesses in .eu have been protective and there have been no big pureplay .eu websites yet.
Written by John McCormac on October 7th, 2006 with 1 comment.
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The reactivation of over 74000 .eu domains earlier this week was not EURid’s decision. It was forced upon it by a Belgian court according to a report in the International Herald Tribune. The court threatened EURid with a fine of 25000 Euros per hour per domain if it kept the domains ON-HOLD. EURid is appealing the court’s decision.
Apparently the Belgian court considered EURid’s move to put the warehousing operation’s domains ON-HOLD to be “unlawful”. This does effectively bring into question the whole idea of how the management of EURid could make such a mess out of something so simple. The EU legislation governing the administration of .eu ccTLD is powerful. EURid was alerted to the problem of these warehousing operations and bogus registrars but the management ignored the warnings. Now it seems that the Tribunal de Première Instance de Bruxelles has allowed these warehousing operations to destroy the credibility of .eu ccTLD.
Written by John McCormac on October 6th, 2006 with 2 comments.
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It seems that EURId, the .eu registry, has changed the status of the Ovidio Limited / Gabino Limited / Fausto Limited domains from ON-HOLD to REGISTERED. This move in the past few days is quite a surprise considering that EURid wanted to put the domains on the market again. But the action is believed to be a temporary one pending the outcome of the court action against the 400 bogus registrars for breach of contract.
This is what EURid posted on its website about these domains in July:
On 24 July 2006, EURid issued a press release stating that 74.000 domain names under the top level domain .eu had been put “on hold” awaiting further legal proceedings. That press release also stated that 400 registrars had been sued for breach of contract.
The domain names are still “on hold”, which means that the contact details of these domain names in the WHOIS register cannot be updated and as a consequence the domain names cannot be transferred. The proceedings are still pending.
EURid has not issued any clarfication yet.
Written by John McCormac on October 4th, 2006 with 3 comments.
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Sometimes it is difficult to tell the press releases from the news on what passes for Irish technology news sites. Most of them seem to be just recycling press releases with an added byline. And then there is the gadget fests where the latest products have unquestioning puff pieces published as “reviews”. So is it worth starting a real Irish tech news site or is the Irish market so small that only mediocrity thrives?
Written by John McCormac on October 3rd, 2006 with 5 comments.
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The Sunday Times carries an article by Mark Tighe about the .eu Fiasco that contains some interesting comments by Patrik Linden of EURid on why Irish companies are failing to get their .eu based on Sunrise applications. It is enlightening because it shows the utterly formalistic attitude of EURid and PwC BE to the core business registrations that ignores the whole purpose of the sunrise phase. EURid gets to pocket all application fees for rejected sunrise applications - so far it has made around 6 Million Euros from the rejections.
The Sunday Business Posts’ advertising supplement “Computers In Business carries an editorial by Adrian Weckler about .mobi tld. He seems to think that it will end up as a bit of an irrelevance. While some points are valid, the .mobi TLD is actually a far better managed TLD than .eu ccTLD.
Written by John McCormac on October 1st, 2006 with comments disabled.
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Perhaps Technorati.com has jumped the shark and is no longer as essential as it once was to the blogosphere. Despite pings and e-mails to its support over the past week or so, it still has not updated the information about this blog. It thinks that the blog updated about 37 days ago. Right now, I’m beginning to wonder if it is even worth linking to Technorati. Apparently this blog is the only one having problems with Technorati. Other blogs seem to be having the same problem over the past few months. If blogs are being updated but not being polled despite pinging Technorati, just how useful and how accurate are Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere stats?
Written by John McCormac on October 1st, 2006 with 6 comments.
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