As you may have heard, the Internet Commerce Association is urging its members and domain registrants to comment about potential price increases for .com domain names. It’s not just the ICA that is warning constituents about the potential for increased pricing on .com domain names.

Early this morning, I received an email from Dynadot with the subject “Important Industry Updates.” The email, presumably sent to all of the company’s customers, informs them of the .com contract amendment that would allow for price increases, and it lets customers know where they can comment to ICANN to oppose the increases.

If you aren’t at NamesCon, you missed Bill Hartzer’s presentation about SEO and domain names related to new GTLD domain names. Bill uploaded the video today, so I thought I would share it with readers. In addition to sharing some background about SEO, Bill also discussed some testing he recently did and wrote about on his blog.

I embedded the video presentation shared by Bill. If you have questions for Bill, feel free to post them in the comment section here or you can reach out directly to him to ask.

On Thursday afternoon (January 30, 2020) at 4pm, NamesCon will be honoring the life of Charlie Gilbert. Charlie was a beloved friend to many in the domain industry. Sadly, Charlie passed away last year after courageously fighting Pulmonary Hypertension. Charlie is missed by her friends and colleagues who continue to think about her and have been honoring her memory in various ways.

I was texting with Tony Peppler about an offer he was contemplating taking on a domain name he has owned for many years. Tony told me what he paid for the domain name many years ago, and while the ROI was solid, the annual return did not look as rosy. Tony shared a tool with me that he used to calculate his annual return, and I thought I would share it with readers.

It appears that the Gold.com domain name has been sold sometime in the last week. Gold.com transferred from corporate domain registrar CSC to Uniregistry. The domain name is now registered under Whois privacy proxy and has a “launching soon” landing page. Jamie Zoch was the first person to publicly notice the transfer of Gold.com and speculate that the domain name was sold:

Sterling Jewelers, Inc. (Kay Jewelers) has sold the ultra premium domain name Gold(.)com according to whois records with the domain name transferring into @uniregistry under whois privacy and a new coming soon page. Buyers appear to be in China based on IP. #gold #domain

— Jamie Zoch (@DotWeekly) December 30, 2019