The .EU Landrush Fiasco 259
googleking writes "Bob Parsons, CEO and Founder of GoDaddy.com, has blogged about the .EU landrush fiasco. During the landrush phase for names which opened last Friday, established 'big name' registrars got exactly equal chances of registering names as did anyone who chose to bill themselves as a registrar. Bob asserts that hundreds of these new 'registrars' are actually fake fronts for a big name US company." From the article: "Here's how it works: All the accredited registrars line up and each registrar gets to make one request for a .EU domain name. If the name is available, the registrar gets the name for its customer. If the name is not available, the registrar gets nothing. Either way, after making the request, the registrar goes to the back of the line and won't get to make another request, until all the registrars in the line in front of it make their requests. This continues until all requests have been made and the landrush process is over ... The landrush process on the surface seems very fair. But there was something wrong with the process -- very wrong."
Go figure... (Score:3, Insightful)
sour grapes? (Score:3, Insightful)
He lost out, and they'll definetly get away with it.
Sometimes scams pay out. Not any more unethical than him selling out to MS for his parked domains.
Umm... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:That is BS (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't understand?! If registrar X had 99 bogus registrars set up they get 100/second. That's more than 1/second.
Who said business is fair? (Score:3, Insightful)
I do not think that means what you think... (Score:4, Insightful)
We apparently have radically different ideas of what counts as "fair".
established 'big name' registrars got exactly equal chances of registering names as did anyone who chose to bill themselves as a registrar
And what about Joe Jones and Sally Brown? Or more to the point, what about Steve McDonald, Cindy Frye, or Dan Walmart?
What you call "fair", I decry as massively biased right from the start. The very flaw you intend to point out, rather than making the process less fair, has imparted the only truly "fair" part of the entire dog-n'-pony.
I'll consider the process fair when humans get first choice, and trying to trademark common single English words carries the corporate death-penalty. Until then, let's not bother quibbling about whether conqueror-X or conqueror-Y managed to rape the most natives.
Re:sour grapes? (Score:3, Insightful)
We all know how valueable domain names are. I thought somebody would have learnt the lesson watching lawsuits after lawsuits on domain names, and would be extra careful while distributing a new list. But no. We continue to let system fuck itself.
In other news... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Who said business is fair? (Score:3, Insightful)
Consider the source... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Who said business is fair? (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you really think Western Europe and North America would be better off if our business cultures fully embraced the models of Nigeria and Russia?
Re:sour grapes? (Score:1, Insightful)
Mr. Parsons' company has made a killing hosting thousands(millions?) of cybersquatting domains. He then takes a huge lump of cash,hardware, and software by Microsoft just to get Microsoft's IIS numbers up.
What happened here with the
Not only that (Score:4, Insightful)
Why not auction them off? (Score:5, Insightful)
A more efficient way to initially allocate major domain names might be to run an auction.
Currently, domain names are allocated according to the law of capture. He/she who first claims the domain name and pays a nominal fee has rights to the name. It IS like a land grab where you can acquire the rights to land by just showing up, except it's even worse because to grab land in the American West you generally had to show up and use it.
My rough idea:
(1) Auction period will last one month
(2) At the end of the auction period, domain names that were bid on will go to the highest bidder. (As long as bid is above the minimum bid.) (3) After the auction ends, domain names will be allocated under the old retarded process
This doesn't solve all domain name problems, but it would get popular domain names to the people/companies that value the name the most.
The Problem with Queuing (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:As a European I hate to say it... (Score:3, Insightful)
It is "unregulated" because there probably are no meaningful consequences to gaming the system. Today's lesson:
1. It's only wrong if someone gets caught.
2. If they get caught, then so what? They've got more domain names than the next guy so they win.
3. The person with most gold rules.
This highlights one of the consequences of a capitalist society. Now, you may say, "So what! At least I get a chance in a capitalist society because there's more opportunity"
But competition is not welcome in a capitalist system. Mature markets evolve to a duopoly/monopoly because the market winners actively supress competition and thereby foster inefficient markets. Thus inspiring regulations to prevent the formation of monopolies.
I urge you to challenge your own assumptions about "free markets." There's lots of meaningful opinions on both sides. You need to know both.
Euro-zone is a big market (bigger than US?) (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm in the UK and I purposely *avoid*
Re:That is BS (Score:4, Insightful)
No, you don't.
That is misleading, the point is each of the registrars have equal change of connecting make request every second.
A registrar following the spirit of the rules has 1 request/sec.
A registrar with 99 fraud registrars has 100 request/sec.
Think of the line as 1 second. Every time you make a request you go to the end of the "line." Someone with 99 shell registrars goes to the end of the "line." By the time he gets to the front of the 1 second line, their 99 other requests have also been processed.
Re:As a European I hate to say it... (Score:5, Insightful)
-Kurt
Re:Why not auction them off? (Score:3, Insightful)
If we had a domain name auction system, how'd you like to bet the government of China would snap up rights to amnesty.org?
Re:The Problem with Queuing (Score:3, Insightful)
If had bothered to come down from your ivory tower and read the blog, you would understand the problem was bogus registrars appearing at the last minute with many being THE SAME COMPANY! They were bogus because they were not real registrars but rather companies squating on a domain name. If the EURID had bothered to do a background check on these companies, they could have prevented the abuse of the system. EURID can still fix the problem but they show no willingness to do so.
Re:The Problem with Queuing (Score:3, Insightful)
The auction system solves this problem because in the end somebody has to pay from a verified line of credit. Thus, it doesn't matter how many proxies somebody uses because they still have to cough up the money when the hammer falls. The post was made out of frustration because people keep trying the same things that always fail and wonder why they fail. There is no suggestion of ivory tower here...auctions can and do solve these types of problems every day in the real world without resorting to some complex and ultimately futile non-money based system that is proof against all cheating.
Re:I'd argue that... (Score:3, Insightful)
Dunno about that. With cyber squaters who capitalize on misspelled url's, it seems in a business's interest to try to grab every possible typo version of their business name too...
Re:The Problem with Queuing (Score:3, Insightful)
The company in question set up one hundred proxies who all could have entered the drawing one time and given this company a 100 to 1 advantage over the non cheaters. This same phenomenon often occurs in elections, especially in poorer countries with entrenched corruption, where the ballot box is "stuffed" with entries filled out by phantom voters. As for the opportunistic vs the wealthy the two are very often one in the same or at least they tend to become the same over the long run.
Re:The Problem with Queuing (Score:3, Insightful)
Concert tickets used to go like that, too, until most ticket agents got tired of having dirty, smelly people in sleeping bags in front of their store for several days every time a big-name band tour was announced. Many of them have implimented a "Now Serving..." kind of scheme where you drop in any time prior to the ticket sale date and get your queue number. When the tickets finally go on sale, the manager picks a queue number at random and the sales go circular from there. That way the crowd doesn't have to arrive until just before the sale starts, and there's no rushing the door because you can't buy a ticket until it's your turn.
Of course, Ticketmaster's online sales system has removed most of that problem by implimenting an on-line land-rush system. :-/
Re:I'd argue that... (Score:3, Insightful)
Unfortunately, your (and my) opinion that more subdomains should be used is just a consequence of the way the internet's run. Consumers are conditioned to expect blah.TLD as a domain name and to be distrustful of long names (with some justification). Having made the conceptual leap that not all domains ending in
Ultimately, the problem is one of control, whether that's self-control or regulatory control. Every time a new TLD opens up, there's the same rush to buy the same domains with another TLD. Why are there country code TLDs? Well, because the USA dominated the early internet and claimed all of
The namespace has been so poorly managed in the past that it's difficult to exert the necessary control to maintain order. The only positive outcome of that is that there's a reluctance to change, allowing us to become reasonably comfortable with the status quo. Earlier in the internet's development, a different approach to TLDs would have helped whereas today it can only waste more money. Fortunately, if the limited number of TLDs remains small, the overall anarchy can be masked by tighter local control. For an example of that, see the
It's fairly clear that increasing the number of TLDs only marginally increases the number of websites. Most of the
I hope that increased reliance on search engines to find desired content will diminish the perceived value of a domain name, with the result that branding and marketing will have less input in the choice of naming, thus hopefully leading to gradually more hierarchical namespaces. At best, that's a long-term goal, and I'm sure it will be preceeded by smaller-scale campaigns to standardize and/or rationalize naming within individiual entities. One example of this would be the namespaces Apple uses internal to OS X.
But then... (Score:3, Insightful)
Although you don't say, I'm going to guess that all four records point to the same physical AND virtual server, AND that your weblogs do not record significant traffic on all four, but that almost all of it comes in on a single name. The other three would then be of historic interest, but not much more.
Having said all that, it's close enough to the two or so name limit I suggested that I'd consider it passable, just not good practice.
But four names isn't where the real problem lies. There are companies with many tens or even many hundreds of names. This is where namespace pollution is a serious problem, and where no amount of justification could possibly excuse all of those names. When you get that many names bought, it is typically for defensive or hostile purposes, it is NOT for the object of making things easier or more rational. I would argue that the DNS tables are no more a place for inter-corporate warfare than the phone directory, and that those who would seek to use DNS for such purposes should be turfed off the DNS heirarchy altogether. The infrastructure is far too important and valuable to sacrifice to corporate IT militias.