.info Why do all deleting .info domains end up with one company?

There is no game as the stadium is permanently locked for private players.

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That is a scary thought " permanently "

It does seem some unfair play is at work.

It's so difficult to backorder one nice .info.
Why PocketDomain caught so many?

Kiss these goodbye too ...

Sarasota.info
Promo.info
SantaCruz.info

... now in the pocket of PocketDomain/Enom

:td:

As some of you might know I am new to this domain biz so I dont have a heck of a lot contacts yet in this industry. I did however try contacting the ombudsman of Icann and he has replied very quickly. It seems he is actually trying to assist me with this and to help me find out where to press official charges against the parties involved as I am still convinced that there must be some type of monopoly/antitrust or some other unfair competition laws against the situation where we find ourselves in. At first he wasnt sure if this should involve Icann as he said it was an issue between me and a registrar. I replied to him that if I was them I would grab all the domains as well but the point is that someone should supervise the actions of the registrars and stop them and penalize them when needed. I also told him that the only party that seems to be in a possition to do is is Icann as Icann is the one handing out accrediation so that these guys can open up shop. Seems that I hit some valid points and investigation will most likely be started now as this is too much now. We are all getting screwed over and also the general public. Guys like enom dont develop any of the domains and just have parking pages. It shouldnt be that great domains which could be used by companies or people to make great websites that add quality to the web are in mass taken by a company that has no plan to do anything with them. Its like buying a city block in Manhattan and then just leaving everything empty and letting the area get run down. This is what happens with all these great domains.

Seems that snapnames doesnt like the situation not the publication of the information. I have been contacted by senior management who seem to want to fix this issue with the .info domains.

jimberan said:

... I also told him that the only party that seems to be in a possition to do is is Icann as Icann is the one handing out accrediation so that these guys can open up shop. Seems that I hit some valid points ...

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Nice going. Your quote above is the point of leverage ... targeting concerns to ICANN as they are the ones who provide accreditation as you point out. Anyone can file a complaint at InterNIC, which isn't bad. But this is not a mere registrant to registrar misunderstanding (that would be addressed thru an InterNIC complaint form). This is behavior that appears to go against the spirit of the ICANN registrar accreditation agreement ... thus ICANN must be directly involved.

Likely, the only way that ICANN will address this issue is for public discussion and public criticism to begin in mass. A looming question is whether ICANN are any longer objective as they are receiving substantial revenue via these larger registrars. So do ICANN exist as an impartial govening body (willing to enforce boundaries) or are they also in the hip pocket ($$$) of the larger registrars? This ties into the abyssmal biz/info/org contract fiasco currently under review in which ICANN were going to allow registries to determine the price of domain registration and renewals - with no defined price caps!

I think this thread is a good starting point for seeing how many domainers, webmasters, businesses, etc. are moved to action. There is no question in my mind that the siphoning off of quality names is increasing dramatically. And I want to hear exactly what ICANN have to say about that. Do ICANN provide accreditation for registrars to gain competitive advantage over customers ... or provide accreditation in order to serve their customers.

One would assume that ICANN are against speculation and warehousing by registrars and registries. Why else have this language in the registrar agreement...

3.7.9 Registrar shall abide by any ICANN adopted specifications or policies prohibiting or restricting warehousing of or speculation in domain names by registrars.

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The Icann regulations also state that registars have to release domains for deletion after a period incase the holder doesnt renew. However there are many domains which have been mentioned in previous threads that remain in hands of the registars and simply have paid ads on them. If you look on the Icann site, Icann admits that they have problems enforcing their own regulations in regards to matters like this. This sounds to me that there is in fact no official body which is able to control and regulate the actions of the registrars.

So what then? Well who appointed Icann to be in charge in the first place. I believe its the US government so isnt this a matter that should be brought to attention to the appropiate government department. They should either remove Icann if they dont do their job properly or they should give Icann more powers in regards to them being able to penalize registrars. It seems however that there is a dire need for possibly a government agency that reviews and instructs Icann or the registrars. There simply is either a lot of corruption going on or just simply a complete mismanagement of the domain system that is in place.

jimberan said:

... It seems however that there is a dire need for possibly a government agency that reviews and instructs Icann or the registrars. There simply is either a lot of corruption going on or just simply a complete mismanagement of the domain system that is in place.

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I just listened to the congressional hearing which occurred this week in which the Dept. of Commerce is reviewing whether to renew their contract with ICANN as overseer of the internet/DNS. I'm going to post an audio link to it shortly. It was a fascinating discussion that, in my opinion, illustrated the unholy alliance that has evolved betwen ICANN and Versign. All of the right questions were asked which exposed the shocking self-interest of Verisign supported and promoted by ICANN who both aim to increase their respective revenues by increasing domain fees to all .com registrants. It's an education worth getting by listening to this hearing.

A huge issue hit on repeatedly was ICANN making "behind closed doors" decisions with no tranparency or accountability for their process. They got their butts spanked in the hearing and were put on the spot to justify WHY the proposed .com contract with Verisign called for up to 7% .com fee increases each year ... when the .net contracts rebid last year (with a different company) REDUCED the yearly fee from $6.00/yr to only $3.50. Verisign and Twomey (of ICANN) were doing the lido shuffle trying to explain the unexplainable. Humorous, amusing, and sickening at the same time. I have a feeling that ICANN are about to enter a phase in which the public are going to shine a million-watt light beam up ICANN's as*, and going to expose any hint of corruption, impropriety, or secret alliances formed with monopoly companies like Verisign.

By extension, the cheating drop-catch registrars are going to receive their fair share of scrutiny as ICANN will no longer be able to look the other way without completely losing credibility. The same registrars siphoning off top names for warehousing have also been engaging in domain kiting and that's about to hit the fan as well.

Congressional hearing on ICANN's role in overseeing the Internet/DNS. And various concerns about their accountability and decisions.

SPECIAL NOTE: This is a RealAudio link and the audio is: 1 Hour 39 minutes in length, but does not actually begin until the first 15 minutes have passed. So you must fast forward to the 15 mintues mark at which time the hearing commences ...

rtsp://video.webcastcenter.com/srs_g2/commerce092006.rm

The problem with a US governmental agency imposing regulation over ICANN is that the rest of the world is up in arms as to the legitimacy of the US maintaining control over the entire Internet. In fact, many countries have dropped out of ICANN for this exact reason. The US is trying to play as little a role in the governance of ICANN as possible in order to appease International relations. In fact, theres been talk of ICANN becoming a completely independent entity and they have convinced some countries to join them or come back based on this prevailing notion. Don't be fooled though, the US government still maintains the root files and they always will, whether ICANN gains autonomy or not. The US government is not one to hand over power, willingly or otherwise, they are just in the business of false appearances. Maintaining the root files gives them extreme power, because at their discretion they could topple the economies or communications of entire nations, which makes for one hell of an Information Warfare weapon.
The best thing they could do in their eyes would be to grant ICANN sovereignty and hope every country in the world joins the new, independent ICANN thinking that the US government has no involvement. At least that's what I'd do

Maybe it all sounds like a conspiracy theory, but if you truly know the power that lies behind the root files it makes complete sense.

Whether you believe all that or not, know that ICANN is basically a sham of an organization that really does nothing to govern or regulate any policies that it has enacted. They get together and talk alot but thats about it.

keep the pressure up guys. Another way to make some noise is to remove your names from enom. It would take a lot of us to get them to notice, I'm pretty sure they would prefer to have sarasota.info over my 400 names anyway, but if there were 50 people like me it could make a difference.

gmac17 said:

keep the pressure up guys. Another way to make some noise is to remove your names from enom. It would take a lot of us to get them to notice, I'm pretty sure they would prefer to have sarasota.info over my 400 names anyway, but if there were 50 people like me it could make a difference.

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I agree , remove names

ICANNT is a "non-profit" company with a budget this year of $33 million. Can anyone get some info as to who that money gets paid to?

ICANNT "profits" via an increasing 25 cent fee on new regs and so have an "interest" in seeing large reg tasting (kiting) and domain warehousing (as above by Enom and many others) continue.

ICANNT "profits" via meaningless accredation and gTLD applications etc. having never withdrawn a single accredation no matter the actions of corrupt registrars.

ICANNT does nothing to create or enforce policy when it comes to rogue registrars.

ICANNT does NOT even follow it's own mission statement or bylaws, under which it was established. Their goals now are pure unrestricted power with no responsibilty and no answer to anyone but themselves, privately and behind closed doors. That's why their big push to become a "private" organization and released by the US DoC.

I too have lost out to PocketDomains. Has anyone done more digging on the relationship between PocketDomains and Enom? I'd be interested knowing more about it. Something certainly seems questionable about this type of activity.

BTW, try running a scan of LLL.us domains--enom has lots of them.

gmac17 said:

keep the pressure up guys. Another way to make some noise is to remove your names from enom. It would take a lot of us to get them to notice, I'm pretty sure they would prefer to have sarasota.info over my 400 names anyway, but if there were 50 people like me it could make a difference.

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Count on me as well.

Any innitiative from our side to deter this kind of "Inside Trading" is highly appropriate.

Comparatively, what Enom is doing (and maybe others that haven't come to the eye of the public yet) would NEVER be accepted in Wall Street, for example.

-db- said:

More interesting still... eNom doesn't even offer .INFO with their public drop service.

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Careful throwing around Enom this Enom that guys without facts - Enom may have no idea what their sibling companies are up to. For what it's worth, I've seen many LLL.info domains actually registered at Enom drop via their 'pre-release auctions' ... if everything written here were true they'd be just packaging them off to PocketDomains.

Don't get me wrong, I agree this is a big problem, but not sure Enom are as deep in it as this thread would imply.

I'd be interested in seeing the link established between eNom and PocketDomains. I can't see it from the public whois records.

Anybody who thinks ICANN will do ANYTHING, is living in lala land.

Well I have a hard time crying too loudly when if I could do what PocketDomains are doing, I would.

Possibly Ignitela LLC and PocketDomain are same company? They are both ICANN accredited registrars.

Lasher said:

Well I have a hard time crying too loudly when if I could do what PocketDomains are doing, I would.

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I agree, I would love to have their system. However, the sad thing is that this has been going on for at least a year and Snapnames and Pool seem unable or uninterested in creating a system to compete with these guys.

still watching this thread...

and the .info is still being "horded" by one company or person(s)

Make you wonder what is being planned for that extension

any latest news about this?