AOL gives out free .com domains to anyone who asks
AOL has just announced that it will give a free domain name to anyone who asks for one.
There’s a catch. You don’t own the domain name; AOL does. What you can do is use is use that domain as your e-mail address and your home page starting in September. So can your friends, family, and members of the same club, organization, sports team, and so on.
It’s an intriguing idea, and one that’s likely to gain some attention from folks who always thought of buying a domain name and never quite got around to it. It also solves the problem of what to do with a domain name once you purchase it: instead of paying a hosting company a few dollars a month, AOL takes care of everything at no additional cost.
August 18th | Domain Names, Offers | Comments (0) |
Sedo announces a New and Improved Domain Parking Program
Better earnings, more detailed statistics, and website-like page layouts add up to more money for you!
Based upon the tremendous success of our professional domain parking program, SedoPro, we will be introducing a number of upgrades and improvements to the Sedo Parking Program over the coming weeks. New features to look for include:
- More detailed statistical tools: Sort your domains into portfolios for quicker analysis. Find out where your visitors are coming from and where they’re clicking on your pages. Identify domains needing optimization, and view trends in your portfolio performance.
- Website-like page layouts: Help make your visitors feel at home with one of four colorful new page designs. Select matching photos to customize the look and feel of your parking pages.
- Better earnings: First, we’re now passing more of the earnings on to you. Sure, this means less revenue for us, but we’re hoping you’ll tell your friends about all of the money you’re making with Sedo parking, so they’ll park with us too! Second, we’re now using a new feed from our advertising provider, which will impact both CTR and CPC for many keywords. Although our tests show that the new feed performs better overall, some keywords will perform better than on our existing feed, and some will perform worse. Thus, you’ll want to double-check your optimization to make sure that you’ve picked the most relevant keyword possible, and follow the advice in our Guide to Choosing Money-Making Keywords.
August 18th | Domain Names | Comments (0) |
Google Puts $900 million on Myspace
As part of the deal, Google will pay $900 million (£472 million) to News Corporation to provide the search technology on MySpace (and a string of other sites owned by News Corp’s Fox Interactive Media) for three years and nine months. Plus, Google will sell banner and text ads on the sprawling site, which last month was ranked as the most popular site on the web among American internet users. This recoups the $580 million (£300 million) the media company paid for MySpace last year, and makes a big dent in the $1.3 billion (£680 million) it has spent on internet acquisitions in the past year.
August 18th | Google | Comments (1) |
IANA Contact goes to ICANN again
ICANN just has been awarded the IANA contract again. The United States Department of Commerce has executed a new contract with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to continue to perform the IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) function.
The IANA function includes Internet Protocol (IP) address space allocation, protocol identifier assignment, generic (gTLD) and country code (ccTLD) Top-Level Domain name system management, as well as root server system management functions.
“In executing this contract the Department of Commerce has confirmed that ICANN is uniquely positioned to perform this function,” said Dr. Paul Twomey, President and CEO of ICANN.
The new contract for the IANA function is a five-year agreement, consisting of a series of one-year options. ICANN has held the contracts for this function since 1998.
August 18th | Domain Names, Icann | Comments (0) |
Ã…land Islands Country Code Top-Level Domain .Ax Goes Live
The Ã…land Islands Country Code Top-Level Domain .Ax Goes Live
MARIEHAMN ÅLAND, FINLAND–Aug 15, 2006
Today the Ã…land Islands Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) became operational. The Ã…land Islands is an autonomous administrative province of Finland and has up until now been using aland.fi, which is part of the Finnish ccTLD .fi.
The .ax domain was passed into Finnish law this spring and on 9 June the last hurdle was removed when ICANN adopted the .ax domain. The new top-level domain will make the Åland Islands more visible on the Internet. The Åland Islands already has its own stamps and its own flag, and getting its own top-level domain name will further strengthen the Islands’ identity.
The registration fee is 50 € for three years, however registering .ax domains is limited to local persons and business. And since there are about 26,000 inhabitants less than 400 domains have been registered so far.
Some of the rules for the top-level domain name are:
- A domain name may not be a word denoting form of enterprise, form of foundation, from of community or abbreviation thereof.
- A domain name cannot be a top level domain whether it is a generic (i.e. .info, .net) or a country code.
- A domain name may not contain defamatory expressions or expressions that encourage criminal activities.
- A domain name must be active (there must be name servers), and it is not allowed to apply for domains to store or resell.
August 16th | Domain Names | Comments (0) |
United States cedes control of the internet
In a meeting that will go down in internet history, the United States government last night conceded that it can no longer expect to maintain its position as the ultimate authority over the internet.
Having been the internet’s instigator and, since 1998, its voluntary taskmaster, the US government finally agreed to transition its control over not-for-profit internet overseeing organisation ICANN, making the organisation a more international body.
However, assistant commerce secretary John Kneuer, the US official in charge of such matters, also made clear that the US was still determined to keep control of the net’s root zone file - at least in the medium-term.
“The historic role that we announced that we were going to preserve is fairly clearly articulated: the technical verification and authorisation of changes to the authoritative root,” Kneuer explained following an afternoon of explicit statements from US-friendly organisations and individuals that it was no longer viable for one government to retain such power over the future of a global resource.
August 8th | Domain Names, Icann | Comments (0) |
Small countries have more .eu domain registrations
Countries with small populations have a higher number of .eu domain name registrations, reports market research firm IPwalk.
.Eu domain registrations are disproportionately high in small countries like Malta, Luxembourg, Cyprus and the Netherlands as compared to more heavily populated countries such as Germany and the United Kingdom.
Ipwalk’s report comes after EURid, the registry managing .eu domains, suspended 74,000 .eu domain names and sued 400 registrars for breach of contract citing registration abuse using fronts, which were located in Cyprus.
August 7th | Domain Names | Comments (0) |
EurID puts all Ovidio .eu domains ON HOLD or QUARANTAINE
After the recent suspention of 74,000 domains EurID has recently changed the status of a certain number of registered .eu domain names. The status of about 74.000 .eu domain names has been changed from “active†to “ON HOLD†or “QUARANTAINE”.
As a consequence of this action from EurID, the number of active .eu domain names has dropped below the 2 million figure (figure that was reached earlier on this month). According to the EurID stats there are now 1.980.059 registered .eu domains.
It appears that EurID might be investigating the .eu domain name registrations of some Chyprus based companies (Ovidio Limited, Fausto Ltd and Gabino Ltd). It seems to be that they registered 74.000 valuable .eu domain names in “landrush 2″.
July 28th | Domain Names, Legal Issues | Comments (1) |