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:

Warren Buffett has once again offered up a lunch with him in a charity auction to benefit The Glide Foundation. The bidding, which ends later on tonight, is currently near $1.6 million. This bid will surely increase, but it remains shy of the record setting bid of $3,456,789 in 2012.

According to the article, “Buffett has said the lunches generally last at least three hours and cover a variety of topics. The only topic off-limits is what Buffett plans to invest in next.” People seem eager to do this considering this annual auction lot has raised nearly $18 million over the last 15 years.

I am curious who domain investors would want to have lunch with if they could choose anyone in the business of domain investing. I am not going to run a poll with pre-selected options, so it would be great for you to share the person with whom you would want to have a 3 hour lunch meeting. Perhaps this is something that