Unplain

Should “city.com” type domain names be in the hands of their local governments or in the hands of domainers.

Why?

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I’m not sure why, but it seems that every friend of mine that wanted to try their hand at domaining wound up registering trademarked names that were available or unflattering trademarked name combos. Why is that?

I had a close friend who was my business account banker at my local Chase bank registered a few years ago the name “aolgoogle.com” I told him he was asking for trouble. He said that since Google had a minor investment in AOL, he figured they would come knocking and offer him a crapload of money for the name.

Wrong.

The name combo had some traffic but he was playing with fire.

Sure enough, they came-a-knocking. He sent me a copy of  the complaining email and asked what to do. Before I could respond, he fired off an expletive filled email back to the complaining lawyer basically saying to the effect to “eats his shorts” amongst other sayings.

Lol, I pretty much told my friend that it was over and to just turn over the name and be done with it.

Anyway to make a long story short, the complainant got the name quite easily. Good.

Last year I had two acquaintances who were new to domaining started registering names that were trademarked and unflattering word combos. With the hopes they could cash in with the complaining companies paying them off to get those unflattering somewhat libelous names back…

sigh.

I’ve explained what was wrong to all the unnamed domainers listed above.  Cybersquatting? Extortion? oops!

Attention new domainers!

Get good generic names. You cannot go wrong. Stay away from any trademarked or questionable names. Because if you do register TM names, you may just get screwed with alot more than the threat of names being taken away from you. 

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That means the thousands of people who read blogs that don’t signup simply won’t be “in the know” with a few things. But you will…

  ooookay… This has happened more than once to me, like alot.

Previously, before my current situation,  I’ve contacted owners of .com names.  The last owner I’ve contacted, had the name parked, nothing special but the site was very useless in terms of what people were looking for. It was a small city.com like less than 50,000 pop with very little traffic. Oddly he answered the phone and said “wrong number”. lol, the number on the whois changed within the hour.

What to do? I sent an offer through the email and was prepared to send the offer in a nice thick manila envelope with the offer enclosed… Come to find out, the address was false.

The next day, all the info was hidden by a “proxy” service…

Hmmm, now if I was a city official, I’d be pissed and the impression would be that, the person was up to no good and is trying to cash in on the city’s “good name”.

Don’t get me wrong, we domainers have every right to privacy and can do whatever we darn well please.

BUT, is this the image we want to portray to the world? Kind of shadowy, seedy, run-from-the-light-into-the-crack  behavior, which could very well have added to the “Snowe bill”?

Unfortunately, when I deal with some domainers, I still get that skittish, I-dont-really-want-you-to-know-more-than-my-forum-name, kind of attitude…

Very few domainers I know of, are like open books.

Good domainers, I believed sadly, are vastly outnumbered, especially by the “accidental cybersquatters” which I’ll mention in my next blog…

So? what do you guys think?

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