DNW Newsletter

Thanks for subscribing to the Domain Name Wire newsletter. Know someone who might be interested in receiving this? Please have them sign up at domainnamewire.com/newsletter.

Where does your business stand on the digital safety spectrum?
Get report

Seven hundred legal, IT and marketing decision makers shared their domain challenges. Find out more, and discover solutions. Get report now

Welcome to the latest edition of the Domain Name Wire newsletter.

May was very busy for me. My family packed up our house in Austin, Texas and moved to the Seattle area.

I'm writing this newsletter in a camping chair in my empty house. Our moving company Allied messed up and we're still waiting on our furniture, clothes, etc. Our stuff is on a train somewhere and Allied can't tell us where it is.

I'm angry about it, and one of the first things angry customers do is complain online.

The easy thing to do is complain on Yelp and other review sites. Many customers take it a step further by creating a gripe site.

Some brands know a flood of bad press is coming and try to get ahead of it by registering lots of defensive domain names -- essentially, they think of negative domains people could register and try to register them before other people get them.

One such company facing heavy criticism lately is Intuit, maker of TurboTax. DNW's story about Intuit's defensive domain registrations was the most-read story on DNW this past month.

Read on for details and the other top stories from the month.

-Andrew

Here are top stories on DNW last month, as ranked by pageviews:

1. F**K Intuit, says Intuit - It's been a difficult few months for Intuit, maker of TurboTax. It has been criticized for lobbying the U.S. government to prevent the IRS from making it easier to calculate and file taxes online, and then using robots.txt to block information about its free version from search engines. What's a company to do? Stock up on domains that could be used to criticize it.

2. Uber.com domain could have been $532 million - Universal Music sold the Uber.com domain name for equity. Had it held onto it until the IPO it would have been worth over a half billion dollars. Instead...

3. Don't give your web developer access to your domain registrar account - Just don't. Even one of the comments from a web developer on this story reiterates the point.

4. Missouri dentist tries to reverse hijack domain name - A WIPO panel didn't approve of this dentist's actions.

5. Sun Valley ski resort loses silly cybersquatting dispute - Companies need to be smarter when choosing domains to go after.

6. Google launches Safe.page to improve web security smarts - It also released survey data showing that web users have a long way to go to become security-literate.

If you missed any podcasts, download these to your podcast app or listen now: