What domain industry predictions does Ron Jackson have for 2005?

One the downside, I just--I’ve been hearing all over the place they’re just cutting off domain names and shutting them down, due to--if anybody has a spam complaint, they’re just shutting down domain names that are at GoDaddy, so it’s really becoming a major issue. We have all kinds of people contacting us, and I’m sure they’re contacting other registrars to get their names out of there, because whether the spam complaint’s valid or not, they’re just shutting down websites and taking domain names out of people’s accounts, it’s really bad.

Ron: I’ve been reading about that, and it’s a very scary situation. I actually personally had a situation happen to me, not with the registrar, but with a host. Someone was spoofing our e-mail address and so people thought that we were spamming. We don’t send an e-mail to anyone, so--you know, unsolicited at all, we don’t even send out a newsletter.

Monte: Right.

Ron: But someone, for whatever reason, spoofed that, and our host, actually went in and took us off line. Fortunately, I was able to get to the president of the company and put us back up, but this stuff where they’re, you know, executing someone before they see any evidence is just a very frightening thing.

Monte: Yeah, it’s definitely scary. So if people are having problems out there, you know, contact us, we’ll help, or, you know, contact another registrar, I’m sure they’ll be happy to take your business if you’re just being shut down like that. Regarding another big announcement today, I guess MarchX [ph] actually announced their secondary offering for the big domain purchase they made from the ultimate search portfolio. I don’t know if you saw the news on that yet. It goes out--the officially, I guess, change of ownership’s gonna happen here at Moniker on the 14 th of February, so it’s gonna be a very large transaction, and the first one of it’s kind, where a whole domain portfolio was purchased for $167 million.

Ron: And they’re getting that out there quickly. They had a window where they could have backed out of that deal, I think that extended well into late Spring, and a lot of people wondered if they would be able to get that financing together, but it looks like that all came together very quickly, much more quickly, I think, that a lot of people anticipated.

Monte: Yeah. And like we said in several of the shows before, it’s definitely not gonna be the first deal that happens like that, and that’s probably part of the reasons why some of the domain values have gone up quite a bit, people are really evaluating their traffic domains a lot differently than they did probably prior to this sale, and that’s actually a good sign for the industry, it gives us a litmus test of what everybody’s been called crazy for doing all these years by buying and investing domain names, and it turns out these things are actually really valuable.

Ron: Yeah, no doubt about it. I think we’re in for a really exciting year, all the indications are pointing that way. So it’s gonna be really fun at this time next year to look back on 2005 and see how much further along we’ve come.

Monte: Oh, definitely. What are some of the other things that you’ve heard about over the last, you know, ever since the beginning of the year that are worth mentioning to the public?

Ron: Well, there’s one thing. You had Ari on, who is just a great guest, and I almost didn’t want to come on because I didn’t him to go off, he’s really fascinating. And his case, the Mess.com case was just one of two in January that were major reverse hijacking decisions, we had articles on both of them. The other one was Kiwi.com. You had Steven Lieberman on--

Monte: Lieberman, right.

Ron: --a few weeks back.

Monte: Right.

Ron: I don’t know if you had an opportunity, or even if the news was out at that point he was on, about Kiwi.com, but the Kiwi Shoe Polish people came after Future Media Architects, which is owned by Elequa, who I know you’re gonna have on as a guest one day.

Monte: Yeah, he should be on actually next week.

Ron: Right. So they tried to take Kiwi.com, which is a generic term, away from him, they’re part of a major corporation, Sara Lee Corporation owns Kiwi Shoe Polish, but Steven successfully defended that, and not only defended it, but the panel ruled that they in fact were attempting a reverse hijacking, to take that domain away from him, and they lost that case. So, to me, it’s very encouraging, because several of our experts in the year-end wrap up we did, where we did predictions about 2005, said one thing they expected to see was a big up-tick in litigation this year, because of the increasing value of domains, it’s gonna attempt more of these people to come after them.

So, you know, that puts a lot of domain owners in a precarious position, so to me, it’s great to see these decisions, where people who are overstepping their rights and trying to take away domains they’re not entitled to, are not only losing, but being branded as reverse domain hijackers, so if they come back to the system again, that label is going to stick with them, it’s going to be much tougher for them to win future cases, so I hope that’s going to make a mot of them think twice before they take actions that they really shouldn’t be taking.