Top domain news: Big sales, expired domain switch and more

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The GDPR failure

As I write this newsletter, Afilias has just announced that it will essentially make its Whois service go dark next month when the General Data Protection Regulation kicks in.

It's easy to blame Afilias for nuking Whois. But I'd probably do the same thing if I were in its shoes. With the threat of big fines in Europe and ICANN saying it won't enforce its contractual requirements for Whois, Afilias took the safe bet.

The chorus of groups yelling about Whois will grow significantly next month, especially when registrars and registries start pulling the plug on Whois data. A lot of people use Whois to thwart bad guys.

As Tim Chen, CEO of DomainTools, explained to me on the podcast this week, the real-life implications of no Whois will hit home when your inbox is suddenly inundated with spam.

Here are some of the ways that a Whois blackout will affect me personally:

1. It will be harder, if not impossible, to do my end user reports.
2. I won't be able to verify who owns a domain before buying it.
3. It will be difficult to trace stolen domain names.
4. I won't be able to connect the dots on fraud investigations.
5. It will be difficult for potential domain buyers to contact me directly.
6. I won't be able to call people to inquire about selling their domains.

Those are a half dozen problems that come to mind in less than a minute.

At this point, companies like Afilias are smart to be conservative. The only thing I can see swinging the pendulum is if the U.S. government passes legislation mandating public Whois. That's not far-fetched.

Enough about GDPR, at least for this minute. Let's review the top stories on DNW last month:

1. Take a look at The Church of Scientology's domain names - The controversial organization owns thousands of defensive domain names, plus some used to attack critics.

2. Another example of why your company must be the registrant of its domain names - A Canadian airline says that a contractor is holding its domain names hostage.

3. Name.com expired domains are now on GoDaddy - The registrar agreed to partner with GoDaddy for expired domains as part of its parent company's deal to sell its domain portfolio to GoDaddy.

4. Star.org sells for $225,000 at Sedo - It is the third largest public .org sale of all time.

5. 17 end user domain name sales up to $500,000 - A three letter domain sold for a half of a million dollars. Does anyone want to buy DNW.com?

Miss any of the podcasts last week? Catch up this week:

#178 (listen) - Learn how Bill Karamouzis is making money and growing businesses with domain names.
#177 (listen) - The challenges of new TLDs with United Domains CTO Tobias Sattler.
#176 (listen) - The owner of VPN.com explains the value of a category killer domain.
#175 (listen) - Understanding the market for corporate domain registrars with Elisa Cooper.

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Thanks for reading,
Andrew