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)
"DNS servers too busy" (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:"DNS servers too busy" (Score:2)
That is BS (Score:3, Informative)
Re:That is BS (Score:2)
In any case, the author has a point. A round-robin would be a much better case, so your statement only reinforces the idea of american companies cheating.
Thanks for the info, btw.
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.
Not only that (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Same difference (Score:2)
I.E., instead of (as the article put it):
ABCDE ABCDE ABCDE ABCDE
It's more like
ACDBE EBCDA BADCE CEABD
I'd argue that... (Score:5, Interesting)
The clutter isn't helped by lazy, inefficient admins and registrars who don't maintain records correctly, but that's another issue altogether.
I can't help but think it would save everyone a lot of grief if all TLD admins, registrars, cybersquatters and ICANN members were just rounded up and sent to Siberia for a couple of decades.
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:I'd argue that... (Score:3, Insightful)
Unfortunately, your (and my) opinion that more sub
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
Re:That is BS (Score:2, Informative)
Max of one connection _attempt_ per second per IP (time ban if more)
5 IPs for registrar.
One concurrent connection at time.
In perfect world this would be round-robin.
However when registry system is loaded it starts to loose connections/timeout/etc. How registrar system behaved on such conditions was very important.
Of course additional accounts changed the picture, and that was discused on EURid mailing lists - however they didn't give
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.
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.
Re:sour grapes? (Score:2)
No kidding. Especially as we let speculators snap up every domain name that expires, park it, put Google ads on it, and annouce it's for "sale" for a cheap $1,500. All based on the idea that someone once wanted it, so someone will want it in the future.
Personally, I think that the second one expires it should return to the "public" domain, as meaningful names are a finite resource, and speculators shouldn't be able to hold new businesses ransom.
This is why.... (Score:5, Funny)
Umm... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Umm... (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd have set it up so that people had to apply to be able to register, so that they'd be able to weed out the illegit registrars, then I'd make everyone submit their lists, in order of preference, and work my way down.
Making it spammable is just begging for trouble.
slashdot.eu (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:slashdot.eu (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:slashdot.eu (Score:2)
Good leaning experience for .xxx (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Good leaning experience for .xxx (Score:2)
This domain will of cause lose all its value the moment some scammer pays for it.
Re:Good leaning experience for .xxx (Score:2)
Re:Good leaning experience for .xxx (Score:2)
Who said business is fair? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Who said business is fair? (Score:2, Flamebait)
Re:Who said business is fair? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Who said business is fair? (Score:2)
Re:Who said business is fair? (Score:5, Interesting)
The point he's trying to make is that there were several unimplemented methods that would've prevented these bogus registrars from gaming the system, and in fact people running the EURid land rush were notified in advance by several 'legitimate' registrars about the loopholes in the system, and refused to do anything about it (in fact going so far as to completely ignore them).
Enron also 'gamed' the system, and look how much damage that caused. It's fair to say that this could also have some dire financial consequences against those who were meant to benefit from this process.
I think his suggestions at the end of TFA have merit, and it would be nice to see something done about this scam... I have a hunch, though, that those in the EURid who allowed the system to be 'gamed' have a financial stake in the gaming process... otherwise these loopholes would've been closed long before the land rush began.
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:Who said business is fair? (Score:3, Funny)
I don't know... There are several people from Nigeria who write every day wanting to share their wealth with me! Some of them are moving to Russia, too, because I get emails from them also!
In Soviet Russia... (Score:2)
What makes you think there is a substantial difference?
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:I do not think that means what you think... (Score:2)
Hm. I had always wondered how the whole XY chromosome thing came about.
Re:What about them? (Score:2)
Why the bias toward companies? I "legally" have my own name in my home country. Incorporation in its most basic sense just means that McDonalds legally has that name, for the purpose of entering into the binding agreements with other humans and incorporated entities.
Hell what about insanely common names like Tony, Chang, Bob or Steven?
What about them? You have
Re:What about them? (Score:3, Interesting)
No you don't. If my name is Steven does that mean I get to reserve steven.com? What if I immigrated to the EU or had my citizenship changed, do I get to reserve steven.eu or steven.cn or steven.hk as well?
Heck I should charge people for using the name 'Steven' because its "legally" mine! /sarcasm
You have two and ONLY two "fair" choices... Pure random lottery, or first-come-first-serve.
Or you could let people and companies pe
Re:What about them? (Score:3, Interesting)
I didn't claim that gave me the "right" to reserve my name - Quite the opposite, a point with which you apparently agree... No, I don't automatically get "steven.com". Neither does "SteveCorp" or "Three Steves, Inc", or even "Steve Jobs".
Joe McDonald, age 19 lives with his parents wants mcdonalds.eu? Uh, no.
With an "s" at the end, I would tend to agree that if we accept the idea of "rights" to a name, he wouldn't get "mc
Pisses me off... (Score:5, Funny)
Dave
----------------
www.da.eu
www.dav.eu
www.dave.eu
www.david.eu
As a European I hate to say it... (Score:2)
Well, at least I have no interest in these ridiculous domains.
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
Re:As a European I hate to say it... (Score:2)
True. Until they reach such dimensions and become so slow and bloated (can a company be "bloated"?) that their competitors can leverage their agility and quickness-to-market (yay marketspeech) to gain more power and little by little displace them. That's why I say an unregulated market is a self-regulating market.
Re:As a European I hate to say it... (Score:5, Insightful)
-Kurt
Re:As a European I hate to say it... (Score:2)
Re:As a European I hate to say it... (Score:2)
Re:As a European I hate to say it... (Score:2)
The GoDaddy dude was complaining about rules that allow for a slanted playing field.
As you well know (or maybe not?), free markets only work if there is a equal playing field for all. The intent was the
Re:As a European I hate to say it... (Score:2)
And I am not going to substantiate this, as you didn't with your statement, either.
In other news... (Score:4, Insightful)
One More Example... (Score:2)
Although it seems just as likely that European companies would scam the system as American ones.
Sooner or later some kind of crisis will happen that will bring about changes to the way that domain names are handled. As noted [yafla.com], three and four letter TLD names are already completely gone, with any reasonable new domain name likely already registered to a legitimate user, or to one of those idiot companies that "hold" names waiting for the highest bi
Consider the source... (Score:5, 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.
Re:Why not auction them off? (Score:2)
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:Why not auction them off? (Score:2)
wow! (Score:2, Interesting)
This, of course, should surprise no one.
Re:wow! (Score:2)
Only 281 for sex.eu?
Re:wow! (Score:2)
Re:wow! (Score:2)
Auction (Score:3, Interesting)
The Problem with Queuing (Score:4, Insightful)
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
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...aucti
Re:The Problem with Queuing (Score:3, Funny)
Try that in a queue in Northern Ireland and you'll have one person holding twenty teeth in their hands, and rightly so.
TWW
Re:The Problem with Queuing (Score:2)
all students have ID numbers.
Randomize the list of ID numbers.
Offer avalible spaces in order they are in the list.
done. No camping out. No holding spots in line, No selling spots in line. No riot.
Re:The Problem with Queuing (Score:2)
Re:The Problem with Queuing (Score:2)
Isn't the point of on-campus housing to care for less well-off students that may not be able to afford an apartment in the city?
Re:The Problem with Queuing (Score:2)
A market rate is economically efficient, but in this case inefficiency might be a good thing. One could ask why a rich senior with a 4.0 GPA should get a subsidised place while a poor freshman with a 2.0 gets doesn't--but I think the answer's pretty obvious: it's a school, and school is about achievement; 4.0 >> 2.0
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 ban
Re:The Problem with Queuing (Score:2)
What's to stop the very same problem as happened with the .eu domains?
Namely, people showing up multiple times to increase their chance of being most close to the start of the circle?
Or (in case the ticket agent is checking ids for duplicates) send friends that are uninterested in the concert to stuff the line for them?
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
Unfair? (Score:5, Funny)
* People set up process that my 5-year old niece would have realized wouldn't work.
* Process doesn't work.
Seems pretty fair to me.
May I Be The First To Say... (Score:4, Funny)
List of registrars shows the phantoms (Score:3, Interesting)
Since this is a pretty obvious process, I guess it amounts to every registrar choosing how many chances in the landrush it wants to pay for... So what? Vetting individual registrars anyway would have been an messy procedure, the EU registry makes some money from the bogus registrations, and nobody knows if anyone will ever pay any sizable amount for a .eu domain.
Want to see the results? (Score:2)
A quick google search on
site:.eu
yields the following:
27 parked by DomainMonster
30 go to NetNames
28 to some unknown with the phrase "dominio parcheggiato" in it.
at 57,700 sites thus far, and an estimate 30 sites per registrars, it works out to about 1900 registrars as he suggests. Thats in line with the ~1200 he mentions in the article.
So google seems to agree with his article if the results are indicative of the true averages.
That's a shame. Hey Europe, welcome to the new
so, welcome to the
/random 100 (Score:2)
Problem solved!
Silly "fair minded" people (Score:2)
All that a queue system did was to create a different value structure. With the new rules in place, it would seem painfully clear to anyone with Econ 101 under their belt (and probably many people without it) that the queue meant that having more "places in line" would give you better value, for not much investment. Duh.
One of the things that capitalism does well is work *with* basic human nature. It is basic human nature to exploit the world for personal gain. Queue
I didn't get any of my domain wishes granted. (Score:2)
So who are the "Company Xs"? (Score:5, Interesting)
I found one of them. Dotster [dotster.com] is the one behind a whole [eurid.eu] bunch [eurid.eu] of [eurid.eu] Vancouver-based [eurid.eu] registrars [eurid.eu].
Has anyone else had any luck tracking down the other companies behind this?
Problem is - corrupt people (Score:2)
Sunrise period allows big business to overreach their trademark rights.
Those running the whole scheme are just concerned with making the most amount of money with least costs.
WIPO.org.uk - skilful.com - WoolwichSucks.org.uk
Why .eu doesn't matter (Score:2)
Pretty much any reasonably sized company who owns a
The most this will be useful for is to host a website for the european arm of a large multinational corporation (which formerly would be ser
There isn't much you could do to stop it (Score:3, Informative)
Well, there isn't really any way to work around this, as someone could simply have paid $50 each or whatever the cheapest state in the U.S. charges for corporations, and register 1000 corporations, then have each apply separately. After they get whatever domains they want, they sell them - for $1 - to the destined 'master corporation' and discontinue operators by doing a wind-up and dissolve . As legal as church on Sunday and as legally invulnerable. Whether you like it or not, a corporation is a separate entity from its directors or stockholders, and two separate corporations created by the same incorporator are, as a matter of law, three separate entities and entitled to recognition as separate entities. So even if some of the registrars are fake, they could still do the whole thing by registering lots of corporations separately. Raises the price by $50 each registrar but when we are looking at potentially tens or hundreds of thousands of euros per domain name they get, it's chump change.
Are you upset because you don't like what they are doing or are you upset because you didn't think to do it? You're the owner of a corporation; realize the purpose of a corporation is to provide limited liability for its owner(s) and thus allowing them, in effect, to legally cheat their creditors by denying them access to the owner's personal assets if the business fails. (Your company isn't public so I presume you're not needing to sell stock, which is a different matter). If this wasn't the purpose of a separate entity, one wouldn't need to incorporate, one could simply operate it as a sole proprietor under a fictitious name. But operating in corporate form allows one limited liability and separate existence from the corporate form. And if someone wants to set up a bunch of alleged 'sham' registrars, there really isn't any way to do it unless you only allow registrars to be individuals.
Short of that, there is always some way someone could - as you call it - 'game the system'.
If names would have been more valuable that multiple registrants would want the same names, then the answer is for the EU registry to auction them itself, thus draining the profit away from middlemen resellers.
Maybe it might seem unfair, but your comment sounds more like sour grapes. As long as someone registering in a system does not have to be a human being and can be a legal entity someone can always find a way to make multiple registrations in that system.
Paul Robinson
Re:The message is clear: (Score:5, Funny)
Re:The message is clear: (Score:2)
Re:But what is it? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Interesting)
Who really cares about getting EU addresses anyway? I guess asking that makes me sound like an isolated bumpkin American, but honestly the same goes for .us and pretty much any other TLD that isn't .com. Do companies really stand to make megamillions selling non-.com addresses? I just don't see it.
Halfway through the initial registration, the .eu domain became the third largest, behind .com and .uk. They have probably passed .uk by now. It is not shaping up to be one of those ignored TLDs. So, yes a lot of people care about it and yes big money is involved.
Re:Who cares? (Score:2)
Euro-zone is a big market (bigger than US?) (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm in the UK and I purposely *avoid*
Re:Who cares? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Who cares? (Score:2)
Re:Who cares? (Score:2)
Re:Who cares? (Score:2)
Everyone else works around that. This ('abuse', whatever, aside) is an example of that.
"pretty much any other TLD that isn't
ahem.
You might not see these tlds on a day to day basis, but then you're American
Re:Who cares? (Score:2)
ian
HEY!!!!! (Score:2)
X.com is PayPal (Score:2)
Re:stfu amerifag (Score:2)
Re:At 10 grand a pop... (Score:2)
Re:Well, for the record... (Score:2)
For posterity's sake, the address and phone listed in each of
Re:Rushes only happen... (Score:2)