First I want to wish all of you and your families a great thanksgiving, as we all have so much to be thankful for. With so many people out of work; losing their homes, companies out of business and retirement plans wiped out, as an industry, we are very, very fortunate.
I see many TV shows giving out their “Turkeys of the Year” award.
Here are thedomains.com Turkeys of the Year:
1. The Governor of Kentucky, Steve Beshear for seizing domain names, he clearly had no jurisdiction over for purely political purposes and to support the states own online gambling interests, and Judge Wingate for for going along with this nonsense and not upholding the US constitution.
2. ICANN. Do we really need hundreds of new extensions, or thousands of them. This roll out is going to cause mass confusion and tons of trademark problems. The potential for these trademark problems will cause trademark holders to go to capital hill next year, to get additional protection for them on causing a nightmare for all domain holders.
3. Tucows. According to ICANN it’s perfectly fine, for now, for registrars to take the expired domains of their own customers and keep the domains for themselves. Tucows.com has been on the cutting edge when it comes to keeping their customers domains, numbering several hundreds thousand and now resells the best of them, on a site owned by them, for prices in the six figures. Legally fine, morally horrible.
4. CADNA, and the Snowe Bill. There is nothing wrong with trademark holders wanting to protect their interest. However, when they want to start controlling generic, geo and other clearly not trademarked terms and start putting people in jail for violating civil matters, they are going beyond protecting their brands and moving towards taking things they have no right to.
5. Bad Decisions on domain cases. We have seen them all year Cases where you would never think a domain would be taken from the holder on some claim of right. My picks as the 2 worst of the year go to LH.com and ChilliBeans.com.
6. Yahoo. Not taking $33 a share when your stock was trading at $20, is well just plain silly. Now that the stock trades at $10, its just plain stupid. Believing that entering into a deal with Google which was never going to be approved as an alternative to Yahoo was ridiculous.
7. Microsoft. Google just celebrated it’s 10th anniversary. Microsoft still has not gotten into the game. They continue to pass on a Yahoo deal at $20 now or 40% less than they were willing to pay in January which would get them into the game, instead opting to change the name of platform from Live.com to Kumo.com. Sure, that will help a lot. Oh Yeah they also have make a great product called Vista.
8. Toyota.me. There were many trademarked domains that went for five figures at the .me release auctions, however the highest selling .me domain on record is still Toyota.me. Several of the big money trademark domains have already been transferred to the trademark holders and more are to come. One things for sure, godaddy.com gets to keep the money they got for selling these infringing domains.
9. WallStreet. Greed, corpution, bad judgement, horrible decision making, leave us with trillions of dollars out of investors pockets, retirement plans and the economy.
10. The Mortgage Industry. Giving of loans to people they knew could not afford the payments, interest only loans, negative amortization loans, no money down loans, forging documents, sex for loans, the list of abuses, goes on and on. Many people benefited from this. From mortgage brokers to the people taking out the “equity” in there homes and pissing the money away, only to ask the government now for relief as there homes are now worth less than they owe.
If you have any Turkeys you think should be added, nominations are now offically opened for the Turkeys of the Year award. Please feel free to comment and have a great holiday.
The .me is my clear winner! How can someone spend so much cash and expect not to lose a TM name.
Also Yahoo! $33 should have sold!
Last but not least is the stupid decision on Chillibeans.com – I hope FS wins this name back.
Regards,
Robbie
Nice post 😉 , Looks like you sure nailed the worst ones !
Number 10 gets my vote due to the amount of damage it has caused.
I don’t know about turkeys, but I do know about diamonds, and this post is a gem! Bravo!
Wow you really nailed it! Brilliant post Mike
Also just curious: Why did you decide to change the blog’s header photo to B&W?
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I think you should add the registrars themselves for not filtering out the OBVIOUS TM domains, such as Microsoft, Google, Toyota, etc.
After all, GoDaddy and the .me registry allowed the highly public Toyota.me and Porsche.me sales to go through without even a whimper of protest. Did anyone report this to ICANN?
I thought not.
This may be legal, but it’s morally and ethically reprehensible. Still, I don’t understand how a registrar can legally sell a TM unimpeded while the buyer basically gets the shaft.
While we’re at it, we might as well (as an industry) look in the mirror. After all, if goofballs like the bidders and buyers of Toyota.me and Porsche.me hadn’t bid, there would be no need for industry policing.
Take heed, all; once government intervention arrives, we’ll be so highly regulated that it will kill the business.
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I like your list Number 9 and 10 is TOP stuff
The two biggest Turkeys of the Year were GoDaddy and eNom for handing over domainers’ domains to the State of Kentucky. They should really be boycotted by Domainers everywhere for obviously not giving a damn for the rights of their customers.
Why is everyone so sure that registrars skimming the good expired domains and keeping or reselling them is legal?
There has been no lawsuit to determine this and the ICANN agreement is vague and open to interpretation.
I would not assume it is legal until at least some real lawyers weigh in on both sides, or this is brought up in a lawsuit.
Class action lawyers and state attorney generals please look into these unfair practices being perpetrated by Tucows, Register.com, Godaddy and the likes.
Also, I wonder if the state attorney general would investigate register.com for moving their corporate operations to Madiera to avoid ny state taxes? You can see they did this because they changed the WHOIS masking address from Canada to Madiera.
Howard is correct enom and godaddy should be on the list for giving their customers domains up to the commonwealth of Kentucky
the Kentucky issue is the one that get’s to me the most…
~DomainBELL (Patricia)
Toyota can legally sell a car to its buyer. But should Toyota be held liable if its buyer’s car was used to rob a bank or some other civil offense, even if the buyer didn’t know?
Phil, look up Lockheed Martin v. NSI and the case below (no offense meant for the linking, MHB, as I have a copy and can’t find some other “free” online independent source):
http://davezan.com/sizevsnsi.txt
Hope you had a good turkey. And I mean that in a good way. 🙂