ICANN accreditation yanked, RegisterFly rebrands and tries again. Though partner Robert O'Niell claims otherwise, it looks like former CEO Kevin Medina is still in the picture. Without accreditation and their former registrar partner, eNom, RegisterFly, uh I mean RegFly has partnered with leading wholesale registrar Tucows to start selling domain names again. RegisterFlies.com comes out of retirement. Previously.
posted by FlamingBore on Feb 22, 2008 - 14 comments

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

Registerfly falls apart as ICANN watches As the registerfly fiasco continues, ICANN seems feckless and befuddled. Some people's anger seems to have spiraled out of control. Others take this opportunity to hone their movie making skills.
posted by a_day_late on Feb 26, 2007 - 54 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

BenedictXVI.com registered a few weeks ago by our very own rcade. He hedged his bets by registering six domains in all, and now is being called out for popesquatting.
posted by riffola on Apr 19, 2005 - 64 comments

Barney is a 6 year old boy whose dad bought the .co.uk domain of his name so he can use it when he's older. Barney is a 60 million year old malevolent purple dinosaur and wants "his" domain name back. Hilarity, thinly vieled contempt and common-sense ensues .. (via NTK)
posted by Pericles on May 29, 2004 - 15 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

ICANN requests Verisign to stop wildcard redirects. The Internet Architecture Board posts many reasons why wildcards are a very bad thing in root servers. Verisign responds by saying "We don't care and you can't make us." (This is a follow-up to this thread.)
posted by dejah420 on Sep 22, 2003 - 66 comments

Verisign modifies the infrastructure of the net to point back to themselves. Verisign has rigged all .com and .net mistyped domains to reroute to their branded search page. This makes them effectively the biggest cybersquatter on the net, and will make it impossible for most spam filters at the network level to operate as well as seriously complicating the lives of network administrators everywhere.
posted by dejah420 on Sep 15, 2003 - 64 comments

VeriSign Can Be Sued for Losing Your Domain Name A Federal appeals court (Ninth Circuit) has ruled that the owner of the sex.com domain, who lost the domain when VeriSgin transferred it on the basis of a forged letter, can sue VeriSign for damages resulting from VeriSign's mistake. The sex.com case is worth millions, but anyone who has lost a domain name due to VeriSign's incompetence may now be able to draw their pound of flesh straight from those entrusted with making sure the registry process works.
posted by mikewas on Jul 27, 2003 - 7 comments

It's What Comes After The Dot, My Dear, that really matters in Internet addresses, don't you know? A useful list of TLDs (that's Top Level Domain names to you, kiddo) is also a reminder of the incredible variety of cool ISO country codes. If there are personalized license plates, why not e-mail addresses? I, for instance, am definitely looking into acquiring a prestigious .mc address. Unless it means actually having to move to Monaco, God forbid. [Via Bifurcated Rivets.]
posted by MiguelCardoso on May 27, 2003 - 34 comments

Use a misleading domain name, go to prison. A new bit of pending legislation (warning: PDF) called the "Child Abduction Prevention Act" (and really, who WOULDN'T vote for that?) has made the use of misleading domain names for sites of "purient interest" punishable by a sentence of up to two years in prison. Seriously. This is going to be very troubling to the White House. No, this White House.
posted by jonson on Mar 28, 2003 - 22 comments

Dow Chemical takes over a parody site Long time reader, first time poster... So what's the lesson learned here? If you make a parody, don't register your domain with a faked name?
posted by mhh5 on Dec 29, 2002 - 18 comments

"VeriSign got in trouble, VeriSign got in trouble!" ICANN serves VeriSign with a formal notice of breach of its accreditation agreement for its mishandling of WHOIS data under its control (.com addresses). VeriSign has 15 days to smarten up or it could lose the .com registry. (via Boing Boing)
posted by mcwetboy on Sep 3, 2002 - 22 comments

ICANN disses the the dot. The guy who runs the Internet Multicasting Service teamed up with the guy who runs the Internet Software Consortium and submitted a proposal to mange the .ORG registry. ICANN's conslutants [sic] dumped on the proposal (300KB PDF) claiming it is among the worst proposals from a technical standpoint. Mind you, ISC produces the software that runs the DNS and actually operates root and top-level servers. And ICANN thinks they lack the technical mojo? Wow! Are we all ready to admit that ICANN is completely corrupt and beyond saving? More info here. (via IP)
posted by chipr on Aug 31, 2002 - 12 comments

I come to bury IAmCarbonatedMilk.com, not to praise it. Salon's Heather Cochran muses on reasons behind the demise of some of the 15 million domain names that have been deleted over the past years. DeletedDomains.com lets you search through the graveyard, letting you wonder just what was the thought process behind notrosie.com or sextoyahoy.com.
posted by me3dia on Aug 5, 2002 - 60 comments

Have you ever wondered how many Am I X Or Not? sites there are? Check your names here. And if you're looking for inspiration for a new domain name look no further than this nifty tool that they have.
posted by ajbattrick on Jul 22, 2002 - 2 comments

Score one for the good guys. Smug.com has been returned to its rightful owner.
posted by ratbastard on Jul 17, 2002 - 5 comments

Today's brain teaser: a pro-life activist buys up a bunch of domains (full list at the bottom of this page) similar to organizations (and their directors), newspapers, and products.

Free speech or deceptive domain squatting?
posted by mathowie on Jul 16, 2002 - 40 comments

Pornographers jack domain name from Florida sheriff. Aycock said the Sheriff's Office had owned the domain name since 1995, and that its registration is current. "When I was told about this, I thought they were kidding," he said. "We dug out a receipt and we're paid up through November. When we find out who's responsible for this we're going to go after them. I am not very happy that this has happened."

The Sheriff may discover that precious few laws protect him and that prosecuting a Canadian company could be tricky. Link from Delaware Law Office.
posted by mikewas on Jul 9, 2002 - 5 comments

Anyone who ever spent any time on the Domain-Policy mailing list before NetSol shut it down without warning a year or more back (it was starting to look evidentiary, you see, and they didn't want to get sued...) will be familiar with much of what's in this Salon piece about John "Gnu" Gilmore, CORE, ICANN('t), and the Great Domain Registration Fiasco.
posted by baylink on Jul 3, 2002 - 7 comments

Are these the hardest domains in the world to register, despite the changes that took effect 1 July 2002? Businesses can now own more than one domain name and the new .id.au domain space provides somewhere for individuals to live, but there are still many restrictions, not the least of which is the 21,322 word exclusion list. Given the recent instances of domain hijinks discussed here, it is not surprising to see that it has already started in the .au world. Are these restrictions good or bad news for the .au domain space?
posted by dg on Jul 1, 2002 - 6 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

The hoopla gets deeper. Upon learning that "Sarah Hubert" was a non-person, registrar AITDomains simply canceled the registration to hoopla.com, releasing it into the wild, where it was picked up by someone from Taiwan. They gave no notice to Leslie or anyone else that I can tell, so that she had no opportunity to grab the name back for herself.
posted by mikewas on Jun 11, 2002 - 7 comments

MacSlash is the latest victim of domain hijacking. Depending on how the DNS fairies have propagated themselves, you may be able to read MacSlash's own thread on the situation, or you may be taken to a generic Dotster page. I got Dotster at work yesterday but I'm still getting MacSlash at home. Not yet clear how this will turn out.
posted by mcwetboy on May 30, 2002 - 23 comments

Last week, Iambic registered the domain names Datebk5.com and Datebook5.com. However, Iambic does not make a product called Datebk. Pimlico Software, Iambic's closest competitor, does. (more inside)
posted by dobbs on May 8, 2002 - 10 comments

Hoopla.com Stolen, Net Sol says, "Oops! Not Our Problem!" Leslie Harpold's Hoopla.com was stolen from her through a series of dodgy faxes (or something...) and now, Network Solutions is throwing up their hands and telling her they can't do anything. If this doesn't beg for Metafilter community action, I don't know what does.
posted by benbrown on Apr 12, 2002 - 103 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

The president of ICANN, the organization that has been attempting to coordinate the Internet's domain name system, has suggested that the body virtually eliminate public participation and be more controlled by governments and corporations. If you're concerned, one thing you can do is join ICANN at Large.
posted by tranquileye on Mar 8, 2002 - 4 comments

Washtech.com hacked The Washington Post's tech site was hacked yesterday. Here's the text (via FuckedCompany) that appeared after the hack and before the WaPo crew shut the site down. As of tonight, it is still not back up at its own domain. Not sure why this gives me glee. I just wish one day someone could hack something and leave something profound in the way of a message.
posted by brookish on Jan 29, 2002 - 6 comments

Cyber gripers arise! In response to the trend of big corporations successfully taking 'sucks' domains away from the owners (vivendiuniversalsucks.com is an example in the article), the Free Speech Center will be offering 'sucks' domains for free for the taking (and presumably first amendment/article 19 exercising).
posted by o2b on Jan 21, 2002 - 10 comments

"Google effect" reduces need for many domains. Dan Gillmor says effective search engines can and should stop people from freaking out that "Wah! All the good .com names are taken" and compulsively registering all the .biz, .info, .tv, .to, and other .crap domains which the registrars would like us to believe are vital. Bob Frankston agrees, [link via Ev] adding that reducing our dependence on semantic (i.e. keywordy) web addresses will improve the stability and usefulness of the web. (I agree too!)
posted by Tubes on Jan 14, 2002 - 5 comments

Register International Domain Names such as "http://www.nërd.com", which is actually available. (Note the umlaut on the e.) If you've been looking for an interesting domain name, only to find that they've all been registered, this may be just the ticket.
posted by fnirt on Jan 4, 2002 - 11 comments

Take that Meatfilter.com... On Monday, Oct. 1, the FTC plans to announce the beginning of a campaign against scores of Web sites that capitalize on typo variants of popular domain names in order to dupe unsuspecting Internet surfers. I think this is a good thing, but how far can the US government truly influence shady internet practices? Should it even try?
posted by thewittyname on Oct 1, 2001 - 18 comments

Internet Domain Names May Have Warned of Attacks “Internet domain names like 'attackontwintowers.com' and 'worldtradetowerattack.com' were registered more than a year ago. It's not known at this time who registered the suspicious names or what their purpose was.” Hmm. Just (un)lucky guesses, or inside information?
posted by kd on Sep 19, 2001 - 26 comments

Opportunistic post-disaster domain name registration? In the light of an international tragedy, why not secure yourself a relevant and potentially lucrative URL?
posted by skylar on Sep 16, 2001 - 13 comments

The Reverend Catherine Sims, on behalf of her Detroit-based "Love Thy Neighbor Corp.", has been using ICANN UDRP complaints to try to wrest control over the domain LoveThyNeighbor.org from "Love Thy Neighbor Fund Inc.", a Florida charity. She's also been trying to gain control over GodSpeaks.net and WuzUpGod.com.
posted by Steven Den Beste on Aug 4, 2001 - 8 comments

One for the small guy Mr A.R. Mani beats Armani for domain name.
posted by bregdan on Aug 3, 2001 - 11 comments

An inventive way to get cybersquatter off your domain. [page 3 & 4] Anyone have any great domain theft/squatting stories? My office just won a domain battle, and was served papers for another soon after. Life Goes on...[also tidbits on the motivations of congress in passing domain-use laws.]
posted by th3ph17 on Aug 1, 2001 - 7 comments

Gosh, it seems as though we have run out of words! Jesus Christ, when will it ever end? Sigh.
posted by tweebiscuit on Jul 25, 2001 - 37 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

NTIA to sell admin rights to .us domain Flying mostly under the radar of the mass media, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration is getting ready to sell off admin rights to the .us domain, which has largely been the province of state and local governments and their various departments. Libraries, schools, etc. argue that the namespace is a "public trust" and should not be turned over to the highest bidder for commercial interests.
posted by briank on Jul 23, 2001 - 8 comments

Latest NetSol Innovation Back Ordering Domains Matt, were you planning on renewing metafilter.com in 2003? If not, I can always just back order it now so that when you let it lapse, it will all be mine... (evil laugh). Or how about we backorder microsoft.com, aol.com, etc. Makes you wonder how NetSol's policy on lapsed domains will be changed. Will they give you the several weeks/months of leeway they used to (just because they were lazy) or will they re-sell on the day it's expired? Related note: did you notice how dotster.com (which I believe metafilter is registered under) takes control of your URL during that leeway period letting the world know you haven't paid yet.
posted by matte on Jul 12, 2001 - 19 comments

tanstasfl. youremail@usa.net goes pay.
posted by lescour on Jul 6, 2001 - 8 comments

More info about the soon to be released .biz and .info TLDs...this time, straight from the horses mouth, so to speak.
posted by canoeguide on May 16, 2001 - 0 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

Too delicious for words: A guy registers walmartcanadasucks.com. Wal-Mart sues. Guy wins. Guy sues Wal-Mart to get them to fork over all the walmartcanadasucks.x they registered defensively after he registered the .com. Cajones, mi amigo.
posted by NortonDC on Apr 12, 2001 - 8 comments