There is not one perfect domain industry tool that does everything I need. In fact, there are quite a few tools I use regularly, often in conjunction with each other. I use many of these tools to better my domain portfolio, and I use some of these tools for blog-related industry research. I am thankful for all of these tools I use nearly every day:
I was looking through my morning DomainTools Registrant Alert email, and I saw an amusing domain name that caught my attention. I hate to toot Amazon’s horn, but the company is now the registrant of AmazonFarts.com, a domain name that was created in August of 2020.
The AmazonFarts.com domain name is currently registered at MarkMonitor, a brand protection service Amazon uses for many of its domain names. You can have a look at the current Whois record here to see that Amazon is the registrant of AmazonFarts.com:
It is arguably more difficult than ever to privately acquire a great .com domain names. The majority of investment quality, long registered, domain names are either in the hands of end users or registrants who will not sell cheap. Quite a few are held by investors who are rightfully seeking end user pricing to sell their assets. Put simply, there is a dearth of investment quality .com domain names available to purchase for investment-level pricing.
Off the top of my head, I can think of 15 people I know to be well funded who are regularly chasing after the remaining high quality .com domain names. Many of these investors are friends, and all of them are competitors. When I come across a domain name that is available for sale and the registrant indicates other offers on the table, chances are very good an investor (or multiple investors) I know is on the other end of the offer, biting at the bit to secure a deal.
A couple of weeks ago, I saw that Finwise.com was pending delete and would be auctioned. I liked the name because it was a mashup of two words – fin (for financial) and wise. FinWise seems like a pretty nice brand name. I did not backorder the domain name, though, because a search I did showed there is a bank called FinWise Bank, and I was concerned they could claim a right to this name, particularly because it would have a new registration date.
NARALO (North American Regional At-Large Organization) is a group within ICANN that is made up of individuals and organizations interested in Internet governance. The group holds monthly meetings to discuss various issues and topics related to ICANN and general Internet governance.
During the upcoming December NARALO meeting, Internet Commerce Association leadership will be making a presentation discussing the domain name aftermarket and its merits. ICA General Counsel Zak Muscovitch and Board Member Nat Cohen will host the talk entitled, “The Secondary Market in Domain Names.“
According to a report published earlier today on Krebs on Security, a popular and well-sourced cybersecurity blog, there was an “incursion at GoDaddy that relied on tricking employees into transferring ownership and/or control over targeted domains to fraudsters.” This social engineering targeted the Liquid.com domain name owned and used by a cryptocurrency company called Liquid. Other cryptocurrency platforms may have also been targeted, according to Krebs.
Prior to reading this report, I read a blog article published by Liquid CEO Mike Kayamori on the Liquid corporate blog discussing a “security incident” involving the company’s domain name. In the blog article, Kayamori reported the following involving GoDaddy:
