Erratic .eu Sunrise Rejections
The Sunrise validation procedure has drawn fire over its erratic and often downright flakey decisions. Indeed given some decisions, it would be a risk to trust PwC BE to validate the recipe to boil water.
Malls Limited one of the UK companies apparently owned by Worldwide Media Inc’s Michael Berkens failed to get malls.eu with a Belgian National Trademark. It also seemingly failed to get mall.eu.
The director and secretary of Malls Limited are, according to the UK Companies House documentation, Michael Berkens and Judith Berkens. Both have the same address:
PO Box 129, Highlands, North Carolina 28741, USA.
The registrant WHOIS data for Malls.com is:
Worldwide Media, Inc.
PO Box 129, Highlands, NC 28741, US
Each is listed as having 18 UK company appointments. The company names for which Michael Berkens is listed as a director are all premium keyword domains.
Girls Limited 05482934
Cartoons Limited 05483925
Voyeurs Limited 05483965
Textmessaging Limited 05483990 (.eu accepted/registered)
Downloads Limited 05483992
Lesbian Limited 05483999
Webcams Limited 05484002
Malls Limited 05484017
Hardcore Limited 05484019
Gays Limited 05484064
MP3S Limited 05485107 (application rejected)
Adultdating Limited 05485457
Weightloss Limited 05485895
Jokes Limited 05485995
Datingservice Limited 05486002
Gaydating Limited 05486005
Skiing Limited 05487949
Boats Limited 05488056
Of these, textmessaging.eu is the only one that appears to have been accepted and registered.
Both Michael Berkens and Worldwide Media Inc are noted players in the US domain monetisation and warehousing business. According to a recent article in a Miami newspaper, Berkens has approximately 50000 domains under his control.
The domain monetisation business relies on type-in traffic and domains not being renewed. Domains are not renewed and are snapped up when they drop. They are then pointed to pages with PPC advertising so that anyone pointing looking for the old site will be presented with a page of adverts instead.
The malls.eu domain was uncontested and its seems that Malls Limited was the only company trying to get it. There are other companies trying to get the mall.eu domain. According to the article in the Miami Herald, Berkens’ asking price for the malls.com domain is $5M. But the question that arises from this rather poor .eu hit rate is this:
How did some companies with obviously dubious and highly questionable trademarks (such as Bar & Celona and Frank & Furt) get their domains past PcW BE’s validation process?
Tags: .EU, Domains, .eu Fiasco, Internet Statistics, Eurid, Cyberwarehousing, domainnames
Written by John McCormac on August 10th, 2006 with
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