As you may already know, I am an advocate of the New gTLD domain names. Whenever possible, I recommend moving away from a .COM domain name to a New gTLD domain name if that new domain you’re moving to is “better”. Meaning that if you can get a keyword-rich domain (with the keyword in the ending), that ultimately will be the better choice for your site. The New gTLD domains, however, have been slowly been adopted, and what it’s going to take is for more and more mainstream businesses to start moving to a New gTLD. That way the public will be much more accepting of the New gTLDs. [Read more…]

Laureate Education, Inc. is suing Domain Name Proxy Service, Inc. for alleged trademark infringement. Case number 2:15-cv-00879, a suit was filed on March 20th in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana. The Domain Name Proxy Service, Inc. address is in Louisiana, therefore Laureate Education decided that it was appropriate to file there. While the lawsuit alleges that OnlineUAEUniversities.com is infringing on trademarks owned by Laureate Education (namely the Walden University and University of Liverpool trademarks), Laureate Education has filed suit against Domain Name Proxy Service because they couldn’t contact the real owner of OnlineUAEUniversities.com. [Read more…]

Apple Pay image courtesy of App Advice.

Based on several domain names that have been registered by Apple in the past 24 hours, it appears that Apple could soon offer Apple Pay supplies to merchants. Apple registered domain names like applepaysupply.com and applepaymerchantsupplies.com, along with a host of other similar domain names: [Read more…]

From January 11 to January 15, 2015, the NamesCon 2015 domain name conference is being held in Las Vegas. I’m personally speaking in two separate sessions, and will be attending the conference all week. As with a lot of conferences that I’m attending and speaking at, I go through the list of speakers and hand pick a list of them that I think you should definitely not miss.

[Read more…]

ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers organization that oversees internet domain names, has been hacked. In late November 2014 they were targeted with a spear phishing attack, and then this month they discovered that the compromised credentials were used to access other ICANN systems besides email. This included the Centralized Zone Data System. [Read more…]

Ever since I originally noticed that Apple was registering nonsense domain names, I have been intrigued about why they would be registering and then not renewing nonsense domain names. And it’s not just one or two domain names, or a dozen of them.

This time, Afilias Special Projects has registered 1862 new domain names in the past 24 hours, which is a significant amount of domain names. Registration fees alone for 1800 .info domain names would be at least $15,000. These new domain names, are all .info domain names, and are pointed to the Apple.com name servers, just like the other nonsense domain names I’ve been following. [Read more…]

Apple has deleted over 500 domain names this week, and decided not to renew these domain names. Most of these domain names were registered by Apple exactly one year ago, and after coming up for renewal they have not renewed them. [Read more…]

7Search, a leading Pay Per Click Search Engine Advertising and Affiliate Network, along with a few other search and domain parking companies, have been accused of traffic stealing in eye-opening research paper titled Understanding the Dark Side of Domain Parking.

The paper, presented at the 23rd USENIX Security Symposium, was researched and written by Sumayah Alrwais, Indiana University Bloomington and King Saud University; Kan Yuan, Indiana University Bloomington; Eihal Alowaisheq, Indiana University Bloomington and King Saud University; Zhou Li, Indiana University Bloomington and RSA Laboratories; XiaoFeng Wang, Indiana University Bloomington. [Read more…]