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.AI Auctions: “too many cases of people not paying”

The most popular auction events in the last year have been the monthly .AI expiry auctions held by the .AI registry in Anguilla. Apparently, there has been a dearth of non-paying bidders who participate in these auctions. As a result, the .AI registry is making a change.

Vincent Cate, the person who manages the .AI registry on behalf of Anguilla, announced two changes that are being made with the hope of discouraging and/or eliminating the number of non-paying bidders:

Pitstop.com UDRP: Whois Privacy Prevented RDNH

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When I saw a UDRP had been filed against PitStop.com by a company called Distribuidora Automotiva S.A., I spent a couple of minutes checking the Whois history at DomainTools. My non-legal conclusion was that this UDRP is DOA and it will result in a finding of Reverse Domain Name Hijacking (RDNH).

The domain name was defended by attorney John Berryhill, and the three member UDRP panel ruled in favor of the registrant. This was not a surprise. PitStop.com is a descriptive domain name, with the “pit stop” phrase used by brands and used generically throughout the world. One entity should not have the right to control the .com domain name for a descriptive term, in my opinion.

Learn the Rules Before Buying

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Recently, I started buying non .com domain names here and there when I see a keyword that I think well-matches the extension. I’m not interested in sharing specifics with you, but I have bought .AI, .IO, .CO, .APP, and .DEV domain names in auction, in addition to .XYZ that I previously wrote about. Non .com domain names is a small percentage of my portfolio and a fraction of a percentage of inventory cost.

One word of caution is that some extensions have rules that need to be followed in order to use the domain name. I learned this after winning a .Dev domain name in auction at Namecheap. A day or two after setting the nameservers to Afternic, the domain name did not resolve to a landing page. I checked in with Afternic and the domain name was set up correctly there. I submitted a ticket at Namecheap to see what was preventing the domain name from resolving, and here’s what I was told:

2024 Global Domain Report Released Today

The annual Global Domain Report, produced jointly by InterNetX and Sedo, has been released and is now available to download at no cost. The 80 page, data-heavy report offers an in-depth view of the domain name industry – both from the perspective of domain investors and from industry providers.

The report covers a multitude of domain name topics with a focus on domain name trends, aftermarket analysis, and perspectives from industry participants. I shared some of my own insights that were published in the report. In particular, I discussed the potential for artificial intelligence to impact domain investing.

Grok Knows .com

Grok is a generative AI chatbot developed by Elon Musk’s company, xAI. Grok has been promoted within the X / Twitter ecosystem, and X users who subscribe to X Premium are able to access Grok.

Over the weekend, domain investor and developer Peter Askew shared Grok’s response to a query about selecting a domain name for development. Peter asked Grok to choose between Onions.com and Onions.net. Peter shared this with Grok’s response:

Dynadot Now Offering Cryptocurrency Payments

Dynadot just announced that it now offers customers the ability to make payments using cryptocurrency. The offering is made via Bitpay, which supports more than 100 crypto wallets and coin options. Customers can pay with Bitcoin, Dogecoin, Ethereum, and other cryptocurrency options. Payments using cryptocurrency are available in USD.

Supplementing the email news release, Dynadot published a blog post with full details about this new payment option. For those who wish to pay using cryptocurrency, the process seems pretty easy: