Meet Kevin Ham, the man who owns the Internet
posted by MetaMonkey on May 22, 2007 - 56 comments

Bob Parsons of Go Daddy warns about the proposed contract between VeriSign and ICANN, allowing VeriSign a permanent monopoly on .COM and price increases without regulation.
posted by Protocols of the Elders of Awesome on Feb 20, 2006 - 29 comments

"Each day, tens of thousands of our precious domain names are bought by greedy corporations and squandered for non-sustainable commercial development." But the Domain Name Preservation Society wants to help. Donate your names after you no longer need them, and they will retire protected within the sanctuary. Otherwise, what domains will our children be left with if we do not protect the endangered domain names of today?
posted by TwelveTwo on Jan 19, 2006 - 32 comments

The Sinking of Tuvalu, by Kevin Maney. The bizarre story of an island nations sinking fortunes.
posted by stbalbach on Apr 28, 2004 - 9 comments

Whoah. I accidentally typed our favorite blog's URL minus a period, and stumbled upon this educational reference site. Those devious hippies have gone too far....
posted by adamms222 on Mar 8, 2004 - 23 comments

Verisign (aka Satan) is set to relinquish the management of the .org domain pool this week, after agreeing to drop both the .org and .net registries to keep the .com one until 2007. ICANN is meeting on it this week (webcast). The list of all interested parties with competing applications is here, but personally I'm pulling for Carl from media.org's proposal for a public trust. For anyone that owns a .org domain, this is one to watch.
posted by mathowie on Jun 26, 2002 - 8 comments

Domain Surfer is just plain cool. I mean... now I can see if a text string appears anywhere in a domain, and the results are clickable (note to the folks who do those awful WHOIS searches: I don't care who registered it, I care whether it's up-and-running!). Anyway, the link is via Rion.nu who, BTW, has some wonderful photographs of the Tribute of Light. And the link to the photographs came via David Gallagher... another fine photographer, not to be confused with that ijit from Oasis.
posted by silusGROK on Mar 14, 2002 - 12 comments

University of Colombia, registrar of the ".co" ccTLD, wants to sell the new dot com
The University of Columbia is in charge of assigning names to Columbian domains, and it wants to get in on the same act as Tuvalu, Togo, and the US. Dissenters say its a public trust. Of course, much like newly minted TLDs like .biz etc., yahoo.com will of course want yahoo.co, and so on. Is there no solution?
posted by rschram on Jul 24, 2001 - 13 comments

Meatfilter? Mistyped URL's usually serve you up a porn site, annoying ads, or endless spawning windows. This one though, gave me a chuckle.

note: you probably don't want to click on any of the links 'cept for the meatfilter one
posted by skwm on May 14, 2001 - 25 comments

Domain name game to get hot this summer... Kent Jordan, who represented .info registry Afilias, said the process has been challenged by people who believe that trademark holders should not have first crack at domain names containing their names. "We reject that," he told the audience. Interesting...
posted by canoeguide on May 8, 2001 - 5 comments

Last week, we got news of new.net, who decided to make a big splash in the alternative Top Level Domain (.com/.net/etc) game, with some moronic, un-coordinated with the other people scheme including some "patented new technology" that amounted to 'set new.net as the search path in your DNS setup'.

Well, apparently they've started a trend, as now there's another player in the market...
posted by baylink on Mar 8, 2001 - 1 comment

New.net lauched today, with their attempt to create their own TLD registrar that seems like a bastardization of DNS. Most people will need to download a plugin, is there any chance this could be successful? Is ICANN doing anything to stop them or will they just die on their own?
posted by mathowie on Mar 5, 2001 - 8 comments

Maybe ICANN really can't. There may be a revolt among all those Europeans who think that they own their parts of the Internet. (Who do they think they are, anyway? Don't they realize that they're just electronic colonies of the US?)

Actually, I'm with them; I think ICANN is getting just a little too full of itself.
posted by Steven Den Beste on Nov 25, 2000 - 2 comments

New top level domains? It looks like we're one step closer to the creation of some new domains. ICANN has posted their staff recommendations. How did your favorite fare?
posted by Aaaugh! on Nov 10, 2000 - 7 comments

Register.com and Staples are offering $1 domains for a limited time. What's the catch?
posted by mathowie on Sep 30, 2000 - 10 comments

Oh shit, oh piss, oh dear. Judge rules domain names are not property. We had enough problems with this in the last decade with 800-numbers. <sigh>
posted by baylink on Aug 25, 2000 - 12 comments

ICANN's Report on new Top Level Domains came out a few days ago, and I saw a list in a paper of some of the new proposed TLDs. These include: .shop, .travel, .news, .sex or .xxx, .web, .arts, .store. Two things worthy of discussion - what's the difference between .shop .store and .web (and where are other CONTENT based divisions such as .gay, .fan, .info, .zine, .kids) and secondly, why are these supposedly GLOBAL domain names all in full uncompressed English?
posted by barbelith on Jul 21, 2000 - 17 comments

www.excite@home.com Anyone know how they got that domain? Which NICs are allowing "unusual" characters, and how widespread is the standard?
posted by owillis on Jul 3, 2000 - 16 comments

Yet Another Domain Name Dispute Develops (YADNDD): chunkymunky.com gets a Cease & Desist from chunkymonkey.com. One is a windows software site, the other a fan site about a cartoon character. Is there any cause for confusion on the part of users wanting to visit either site (actually, one would have to misspell "monkey" in order to get to the windows site)? Should the chunkymunky.com site owner have taken down his/her site? Who is going to protect domain owners from future things like this happening?
posted by mathowie on May 23, 2000 - 21 comments

To continue the theme, Yahoo starts going after "sound-alike" domains with a little help from ICANN.
posted by Mick on May 9, 2000 - 2 comments

I don't believe it... I actually agree with something Network Solutions has done. They've apparently changed their policy to make domain name squatting more difficult. The story sounds sympathetic to the two ladies in question, but I'm not. Ok, maybe they should have been a touch more careful in how they *rolled out* the new policy, but the policy itself is about 5 years overdue.

Now, if we could just get them to *do what we tell them to*...

Cheers,
-- jra
posted by baylink on Apr 13, 2000 - 10 comments

Buyer's Guide to Alternadomains . Can't secure a .com/.org/.net domain? As we know, a host of small nations are selling their domainspace, but the requirements have always been a bit confusing. So I did my research and compiled all the basic information on one page. Now you can comparison-shop among .cc, .gg, and .nu!
posted by joeclark on Feb 23, 2000 - 5 comments

Thanks to the scarcity of good domain names, we're stuck with stupid ideas like piiq.com. Here's their deal: you put the letter 'p' and 'q' around anything you want, and their site will come up, like pbookq.com, ptoysq.com, and pfoodq.com. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
posted by mathowie on Nov 28, 1999 - 1 comment

Due to the recent truce between the ICANN and NSI, new suffixes may be prevented from ever being allowed or at least delayed. It's a shame, because good URLs are running out fast and domain squatters are making a killing.
posted by mathowie on Oct 5, 1999 - 0 comments