Twice Sold for $22k, Undergraduate.com in “On Hold” Status

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November 14, 2018

At the top of NameJet’s “The Drop” list of domain names that are pending delete is the Undergraduate.com domain name. It has been registered at Uniregistry, and it is currently in “On Hold” status until it deletes, at which point drop catching services will compete to grab it and re-register the domain name.

Undergraduate.com is quite valuable, and the domain name has been sold publicly at least twice before. NameBio shows two public sales records:

$22,000 via Sedo in May of 2011
$22,301 via NameJet in March of 2014

Once the domain name drops and is caught by a third party, the domain name creation date will reflect its 2018 registration.

At the present time, I can see that there

ICA to Host Annual Dinner at NamesCon

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Elliot Silver

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November 14, 2018

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The Internet Commerce Association (ICA) will be hosting its annual dinner during the NamesCon conference in Las Vegas. The ICA dinner will be held at the House of Blues restaurant, the B Side lounge at Mandalay Place on Monday, January 28th at 6pm.

The annual ICA dinner was started as a way for ICA members to meet and to get to know each other. I believe there will be one or two members of the ICA board who will briefly speak during the event to give an update on ICA initiatives. Some ICA members include Sedo, Escrow.com, GoDaddy, NameBright, and quite a few other companies that are in the domain investment business.

Dinner attendees do not need to be NamesCon conference attendees, so people are invited to purchase tickets for industry friends, significant others, or others who want to support the ICA. In addition

NationalLanding.com Domain Name Registered 2.5 Months Ago

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Elliot Silver

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November 13, 2018

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According to reports today, Amazon is locating one of its two new “headquarters” to Virginia. The area has been known as Crystal City, but apparently it is rebranding as National Landing.

Quite a few news outlets were tweeting about this today, including NBC News:

Amazon introduces “National Landing” headquarters to confused Washington-area residents. https://t.co/59uqKvw2kr

— NBC News (@NBCNews) November 13, 2018

Interestingly, the NationalLanding.com domain name was registered on August 28, 2018 at MarkMonitor – over

ICA Fires Back at Verisign

By

Elliot Silver

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November 13, 2018

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Verisign and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) recently reached a deal that will allow Verisign to raise the price on .com domain name registrations (and renewals). The Internet Commerce Association (ICA) which represents the interests of domain investors and domain industry companies, had previously organized a campaign in opposition of the price increase. The campaign included a Change.org petition, which achieved over 2,300 signatures of support.

Shortly after the agreement between Verisign and the NTIA was announced, Verisign published a concerning article, which, in my view, seemed to mischaracterize domain investors and domain investing. The blog post referred to domain speculation as “domain scalping.” The company seems to have called out industry leaders GoDaddy and HugeDomains in the article. The sentence I found most concerning was this one that called into question the business of domain investing:

Google Launches Another Site on a Non-.Google New gTLD

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Elliot Silver

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November 13, 2018

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The Google Chrome Developer Relations team announced the launch of a new website on a new gTLD domain name. Like Google’s .New domain names I wrote about a couple of weeks ago, the company is using a non-.Google new gTLD domain name.

Here’s the tweet from yesterday afternoon mentioning the recently launched Web.Dev website:

🆕We just announced https://t.co/nDFBkP4gxa⚡️
It is a brand new site form the team behind this account✨Learn how to build for the web and measure if your site is meeting good practice goal❤️

It is open beta Today, so please give it a try & tell us what you think 🙂 pic.twitter.com/ZXZC9v1wvd

— Chrome Developers (@ChromiumDev) November 12, 2018

At some point, major companies launching websites on new gTLD domain names will not be newsworthy. From my perspective, Google’s usage of them is a tacit endorsement of the new extensions, and I think it is noteworthy. For what it’s worth, Google operates the .Dev registry, so it makes sense that the company would be using one of its own new extensions. This is also the case for .New.

Personally, I don’t think this moves the needle

GoDaddy / NameFind Wins Legally.com UDRP, But It’s Worth a Read

By

Elliot Silver

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November 12, 2018

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When I first saw the Legally.com UDRP filing, I thought it would be a slam dunk for GoDaddy, which is the registrant of the domain name via its NameFind portfolio company. The Legally.com UDRP decision was published today, and although the registrant prevailed, it seemed a bit closer than I would have assumed. GoDaddy was represented in this proceeding by Gerald Levine of Levine Samuel, LLP.

Legally is a generic dictionary term, and it is also the name of at least a couple of companies that use non-.com domain extensions. The complainant in this filing is a company that was established in 2015, and it uses the Legally.CO domain name for its business. NameFind reportedly acquired the Legally.com domain name in 2017 when it acquired a group of domain names from YummyNames, which is the portfolio company associated with Tucows.

There was quite a bit of discussion about whether or not the domain name was registered in bad faith. Legally is a keyword, but it is also a trademark for the complainant. Here’s an excerpt from the decision discussing this:

DomainInvesting.com

Twice Sold for $22k, Undergraduate.com in “On Hold” Status

ICA to Host Annual Dinner at NamesCon

NationalLanding.com Domain Name Registered 2.5 Months Ago

ICA Fires Back at Verisign

Google Launches Another Site on a Non-.Google New gTLD

GoDaddy / NameFind Wins Legally.com UDRP, But It’s Worth a Read

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