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

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

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

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

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

Unbelievable news nugget of the day: my friend Matt Lavallee has been slapped with a cease-and-desist order from the Mattel Toy Corporation for his personal domain, mattl.com. I guess no one with a name that sounds like a misspelled company is allowed to buy domains from now on? Something needs to be done, corporations do not own the web.
posted by mathowie on May 8, 2000 - 62 comments

I was thinking buying some new URLs, and I was suprised to see WebDork.com was not only taken, but the owner has a kind of cool site up. Hmm...I wonder if HTMLackey.com or SlaveToTheWeb.com is taken? If you're looking for good unused domains, check Grant's Domain Name of the Week page.
posted by mathowie on Mar 5, 2000 - 2 comments

Another domain battle begins, as the Honda Motor Corp. is suing the owner of honda.net, a fan site owned by a web designer. The owner has his own take on it, and Alan Herrell wrote a nice summary too. Come on Honda, let it go, this is a pointless fight.
posted by mathowie on Feb 25, 2000 - 2 comments

I thought I'd never get to see the day that this happened, but etoy.com is back online. The War Is Over.
posted by mathowie on Feb 19, 2000 - 1 comment

Here's a nice survey of geographic location of domain name ownership. I was surprised to see that people in Los Angeles own more domains than San Francisco, but I assume the researcher didn't lump all the Silicon Valley cities together to get that number. I'm sure a "Bay Area" grouping would be number one. Of the .com, .org, and .net addresses, the US still leads the world with 2/3 of all addresses in that domainspace, so I guess the web will continue to be American-centric for some time.
posted by mathowie on Feb 14, 2000 - 1 comment

Today I was once again reminded why I hate domain squatters so much. I wanted to find the website for Scream 3, but scream3.com is some half-assed hacked site. Every domain with "scream3" in it seems to be taken (some by Miramax), but none of them resolve to a movie site. The only one that looks halfway official is in french. Here it is, opening weekend, and there doesn't seem to be an official site up that I can use.
posted by mathowie on Feb 6, 2000 - 3 comments

The delay in adding new top level domains drags on, and there seems to be no solution in sight. ICANN can't agree on whether or not to add new TLDs like .biz, .cars, or .corp., but they are discussing it at an upcoming meeting in March. I would hope they add enough domains to make domain squatting difficult, but I bet large corporations will just buy everything with their name it anyway, and fight over others' use of their name with a different TLD. What a mess.
posted by mathowie on Jan 28, 2000 - 0 comments

Finally! eToys.com drops the suit against ETOY.com and agrees to pay up to $40,000 of their legal fees. Finally! Now, I wonder what the group of people I built etoys-sucks.com with are going to do with the domain?
posted by mathowie on Jan 25, 2000 - 1 comment

A couple weeks back, there was a snafu by one of the new registrars that allowed people to register domains that ended in dashes. Apparently, they haven't completely eradicated them, since http://microsoft-.com seems to be working (and it's funny too!).
posted by mathowie on Jan 22, 2000 - 3 comments

Well, the eToys/ETOY fiasco may be over. Although, I don't like it when their lawyers say they're not pushing the case any longer, and specifically saying they're not dropping the case. As if the threat will always be there or something.
posted by mathowie on Dec 29, 1999 - 0 comments

Here's a gross mis-use of the web: 800-357-7766.com. This mail order company is spamming the airwaves with commercials for their goofy 'tap lights,' and at the end of each commerical, they advertise their website with this unwieldy address. For less than $50, the company could have bought 'taplights.com' and directed customers there, but instead they force people to write down an address that goes against all the reasons why we have the domain registry in the first place. Why don't they just give our their IP address instead? It's about as useful as their phone number domain name.
posted by mathowie on Dec 25, 1999 - 0 comments

Network Solutions has pulled etoy.com's domain record and email sent to any etoy.com address is bouncing. Since when did a judge in Southern California and a domain registrar in Virginia ever get the idea that they control the internet and can make these decisions that affect the world? In response to this, one of the protestors bought fuck-you.com, which is currently pointing at etoys.com.
posted by mathowie on Dec 15, 1999 - 0 comments

Thanks to the great work of Alan Herrell, a press release about the etoys-sucks.com site is now up at techmall.com.
posted by mathowie on Dec 10, 1999 - 0 comments

A group of folks from the evolt.org mailing list decided to do something to protest etoys's recent actions. One person purchased a domain, another setup web space, a couple people wrote some articles and I designed the site. Keep that boycott going.
posted by mathowie on Dec 9, 1999 - 0 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

I'm quickly realizing that everything I buy comes with a URL. Tonight I ordered a pizza, which came in a box emblazoned with www.DominosLA.com, and I noticed that now I can even order my pizzas from dominos online. Even with all this new tech, Domino's still needs to add one thing: an extra field in their customer database for tip rating. I tip heavily and would love to get better service as a result.
posted by mathowie on Nov 11, 1999 - 0 comments

I noticed today that zipper.com's available domain name list isn't working as well as it used to. Now that Register.com is a registrar, the zipper dictionary database isn't picking up names registered at Register.com. I also noticed that anything remotely cool or useful on the zipper list has already been bought by domain speculators (squatters).
posted by mathowie on Oct 14, 1999 - 0 comments

This is weird. Today, I accidentally typed 'Addidas.com' in my browser and ended up at Yahoo. I looked up the domain's owner, but it wasn't Yahoo. Adidas.com is what I was really looking for.
posted by mathowie on Oct 11, 1999 - 0 comments

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