I read the well deserved platitudes towards Laurie Kirk after she announced her retirement this past week. One of the reasons Laurie is so appreciated is because she became the NameJet point person for so many people. If there was any technical or other issue, Laurie has been the person to contact. I know if I contacted her, she would fix the issue, get me an answer about something, or put me in touch with someone who could take care of the issue.

Every company in the domain industry should have a point person to contact. This has to be a tough job, but I think it is very helpful to customers and promotes goodwill within the domain industry.

One thing I have noticed is that people tend to fire away on domain forums if something goes wrong (or if they think something is going wrong) rather than trying to resolve an issue privately. Perhaps this is because of historical problems with companies, distrust, language issues, or a

Yesterday afternoon, I spent a couple of hours at a family event. For part of that time, I was chatting with a friend of the family who is Rabbi. I had not spoken with this Rabbi for quite some time, and of course he asked what I do for a living. I told him about my business.

The Rabbi knew a bit about domain names because of an experience he had. He told me he owned Rabbi[Name].com for several years but accidentally let it expire. By the time he realized what happened to the domain name, it was too late to recover it. The domain name is now owned by a large domain investment company and is listed for sale for a little under $3k. The Rabbi couldn’t understand why it would be worth that much money to someone, and he opted to register the .net domain name instead. I briefly explained to him about the business of domain name investing, and he understood the basics.

The Rabbi didn’t pass any judgement about domain name investing, but I felt a bit guilty about what I do. I am sure I buy domain names at expiry auctions that were the result of an accidental expiration. On a rare occasion, I will

The Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) covered some news about an error that was caused by using an incorrect domain name in an email address. The error involved the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA). Here’s what happened, according to SMH:

“The bank on Friday said it had conducted an information security investigation, after it emerged that last financial year staff had inadvertently sent 651 internal emails to email addresses with the domain name cba.com, rather than the bank’s actual domain name of cba.com.au.”

Incidentally, something very similar recently happened to a different bank in Australia when “customer information was sent in error to an nab.com address rather than an email address on the nab.com.au domain,” reported ZDNet in January of 2017.

A little less than a year ago, I wrote an article about how email is the domain name X factor. Many companies still don’t think domain names are super important. They may feel their money is better spent on branding or building products/services rather than buying an expensive exact match domain name. Companies that think this way may opt for a less expensive ccTLD or cutesy domain name like “GetX” or “UseX” instead of the exact match .com name. Clients, vendors, prospects, and apparently even internal marketing teams may be confused or forgetful and use the brand match .com domain name instead. If the email snafu involves private information or data being shared with unauthorized parties, that can be a big problem if the company doesn’t control that other domain name.

This is another example of why companies, especially those who retain private consumer data, should practically do whatever it takes to get the brand matching .com domain name for their business.

As you may recall, I wrote about the CBA.com domain name a couple of years ago. The SMH article also discussed the acquisition of the domain name, but I found one aspect of the article to be a bit confusing:

GDPR is coming this Friday, May 25. Unless there is a last minute reprieve (litigation or something else unexpected), the Whois system will likely disappear. This is going to have a big impact on the business of domain name investing.

It will become harder to contact domain name owners. It could become more difficult or cumbersome to transfer domain names to other registrars. Performing due diligence could be more challenging. Domain investors may benefit a bit from GDPR, but I think there is a great chance domain investing could become more difficult.

I am hopeful ICANN and domain registrars figure out a GDPR compliant system that works and allows domain investors to continue to operate as usual. In the short term, I am not sure this is going to be possible, so I am preparing my domain portfolio in anticipation of some GDPR related problems.

There is still time, so I thought I would share some of the ways I am preparing for GDPR. I invite you to share the ways you are preparing if you would like.