Ireland’s .ie ccTLD Tops 80K Domains

Ireland’s .ie ccTLD went over 80,000 domains registered yesterday. It was a landmark for a country code domain that had been mired in controversy only a few years ago. The next psychological barrier for .ie will be the 100K mark. The growth in .ie ccTLD is not happening at the expense of .com TLD. There is a clear growth pattern as more and more Irish businesses become web aware. The .eu fiasco, where the utterly incompetent EURid completely banjaxed .eu for citizens of the EU, has highlighted the value of a good, better run and more trustworthy ccTLD.

If the Personal Name Domains (as covered by Michele on his blog) are implemented later this year, it could drive .ie over the 100K mark rapidly. At the moment, registering personal names in the .ie ccTLD is somewhat problematic. And the idea gets floated to unsuspecting technology journalists quite frequently. The technology journalists often thinks that they are getting a great new insight but in reality, the same idea has been floating around for years - even back to the Fagan days of IEDR.

Latest Irish HosterStats Report published monthly by WhoisIreland.com

Tags: Irishblogs , IEDR , Domains , .ie , Internet Statistics , Comreg , domainnames

Written by John McCormac on June 12th, 2007 with 3 comments.
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Top Irish Web Hosters - June 2007

The term BIONIC refers to the sum of Biz, Info, Org, Net, IE, Com domains on a hoster. The Sample dates are 01 May 2007 and 01 June 2007. The diff is the change in numbers between those dates.

The statistics above are from the latest HosterStats report published monthly by WhoisIreland.com

Tags: Irishblogs , IEDR , Domains , .ie , Internet Statistics , Comreg , domainnames

Written by John McCormac on June 11th, 2007 with 2 comments.
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Google Recovers Typosquatted .ie Domains

Google recovered a number of .ie domains that were typosquats of Google. The domains (googol.ie, gogle.ie, googl.ie and googel.ie) were part of a terminated IE Dispute Resolution Proceeding against Gabor Varga and Joszef Petho of eubrowser.com. The domains were transferred in the last month. A number of other domains that, potentially, infringe on the trademarks of others have been registered by Eubrowser.com in the last few years. A number of other blogs such as Michele’s, Ambrand and Brian Greene also covered this pattern of questionable domain registration.

Adidas.ie was recovered after Adidas took an IEDRP against Eubrowser.com. The WIPO decision DIE2006-004 makes interesting reading as Adidas effectively demonstrated the bad faith nature of the registration. It also mentioned a letter from IEDR “indicating its belief that the Registrants have been manipulating the criteria for .ie domain registrations is further evidence of bad faith.”

Eubrowser.com’s registration of generic .ie domains is not the problem. The problem arose when it infringed on the intellectual property of others. But IEDR should really have been paying attention to these questionable registrations. Surely when someone tries to register the domain name irishindependent.ie and they are not representing one of the best selling newspapers in Ireland (The Irish Independent), some questions should be asked about the veracity of the registration and the quality of those doing the checking. It is clear that the rules were gamed.

The domains were shifted to the nameservers of Markmonitor.com and are now registered to Google.

Tags: Irishblogs , IEDR , Domains , .ie , Internet Statistics , Comreg , domainnames

Written by John McCormac on June 9th, 2007 with 1 comment.
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Over 250K .eu Domains Dropped In April

Over 250K .eu domains have dropped in April 2007. Many of them will not be reregistered. The reasons for this vary. Some of the domains were clear attempts at cybersquatting. Political parties and politicians had their names registered as .eu domains. High profile websites and brands were also targeted in the hope that the domains could then be sold quickly for a profit by the squatters.

One squatter operation, the XSS.RO/Kurt Janusch one had over 34K .eu domains deleted in April. Prior to the drop, it had over 43K .eu domains on its monetisation site. It now has approximately 11K. The Jay Westerdal/Ray King operation (using eight UK front companies) removed the nameserver data from at least 40K of their warehoused .eu domains in an effort to hide them. A significant percentage of .eu domains are hidden like this in order to evade detection because many of these warehoused domains would have trademark and intellectual property rights issues.

Many of the dropped domains, have as of this date, not been reregistered even after they have been released from quarantine. The quality of these dropped domains varied considerably from relatively good domains to complete dross. The problem for most speculators was that they applied mature market reasoning to a new launch, registering domains that might have a resale value in a mature market like that of .com TLD. However in a new market like .eu ccTLD, they were rubbish domains that would not even recover the registration fee.

The direct navigation operations like Ovidio and the Westerdal/King warehousing operation have renewed their .eu registrations. The danger is that many of the domains dropping now are from the business core of approximately 1.2M .eu domains. These domains form the heart of any ccTLD. They are the business domains that give an extension credibility - in the case of .eu, that credibility is completely lacking after the stupidity and incompetence of EURid’s management in handling the Landrush and warehousing issues.

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Tags: Irishblogs,Eurid, .eu Statistics, Domains, Webhoster Stats, Internet Statistics, Cyberwarehousing, domainnames

Written by John McCormac on June 3rd, 2007 with 3 comments.
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