The Boston domain investing meetup will be held tomorrow at Bill’s Bar in Boston at 5pm. The event is a fundraiser for Dana-Farber Cancer Institute via my Pan-Mass Challenge ride fundraising campaign found at TeamSilver.Rocks. The event is being sponsored by Sedo and the appetizers are being donated by Bill’s Bar. I expect somewhere around 30 people in attendance, give or take.

I also want to make you aware of several other domain industry meetups and events that are happening in various locations throughout the United States and the world in the next few months. If you know of other domain industry events, I invite you to share them here.

Long Island

Rook Media / Domain Sponsor organized and hosted a fun domain investor meetup in Chicago earlier this week. There were around 20 people in attendance, and it was a great opportunity to meet other people who are involved in the business while having a good time in Chicago. I caught a couple of Cubs’ games, took a boat tour, had some good food, and had a relaxing time in Chicago.

The thing I enjoyed most about the event was that there was a greater opportunity to chat with people than at a conference. I met a few people who are active in the business who I hadn’t previously met or had only chatted with via email, blog comments, or social media. I was also able to learn more about Rook, and I am going to try out their parking platform beginning next week.

I would encourage

Did you feel the ground shake under your feet?   That little tremor is the result of ICANN staffers trying to make it easier for companies to suspend your domain names by forcing the Uniform Rapid Suspension System (URS) into legacy domain name agreements.

Take a minute out of your day to send an email to ICANN opposing adding URS to legacy domains.   Today is the last day to comment.   You’ll feel good that you will have just made your business a little more secure.

A little background – the URS is an experimental policy that was rolled out as part of the big new expansion of top level domains (new gTLDs).   The URS is a  quicker, faster, cheaper  way for a company that has a problem with your domain name to shut it down than by using the older Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP).

There are two big problems with what ICANN staff is trying to do:

Last week, I wrote about Namecheap’s effort to save domain name privacy. The domain registrar and hosting company teamed up with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Fight for the Future to launch RespectOurPrivacy.com.

Via a tweet from GoDaddy, I learned that there are quite a few domain industry companies that are backing the Save Domain Privacy campaign. According to the SaveDomainPrivacy.org website, “The SAVE DOMAIN PRIVACY campaign is a collaborative effort of several concerned Registrars and Privacy Service Providers, in partnership with privacy experts and civil society groups focused on these issues within ICANN.”

Some of the domain industry companies most of us in the industry know that are actively supporting the campaign include the following companies: