Michael Arrington writes …
There is nothing that .TEL does that Facebook and other services don’t do already (and better). Nor is .TEL somehow more trustworthy because it has ICANN’s backing - ICANN is notorious for approving just about any new project as long as they get their fees (ICANN was in favor of creating a special porn domain name until the U.S. Senate suggested it might be a bad idea). And users will also need to buy the domain names through registrars, which are notorious for abusing user trust.
In other words, these are the last people you want to be holding all of your personal information.
.Tel Is Just A Featureless Social Network That Costs $10/year
Registrars
Robin Wauters writes …
Having working in the domain name industry myself for a couple of years, I’ve always been intrigued by the fact that there’s such a big business formed around something as trivial as a bunch of letters and numbers used to ‘translate’ IP addresses. And when there’s a big business in something, you just know there will be a grey area as well where ethics are left at the door sometimes.
Andrew Allemann over at Domain Name Wire has been doing an excellent job researching the hoops The Go Daddy Group jumps through to keep its shady tactics outside of the public view, resulting in this great blog post. Turns out The Go Daddy Group, which runs the world’s largest domain name registrar GoDaddy.com as well as some other domain name related companies, is apparently warehousing its customers’ expired domain names and directly profiting from them.
GoDaddy Uses Standard Tactics To Warehouse Domains
Registrars
EuroDNS, in partnership with Sedo, is glad to announce the launch of the newly created whois.de service (www.whois.de), a major platform to gather a wealth of information about Internet domain names including ownership lookup and availability for Registration.
Luxembourg (PRWEB) August 31, 2008 — The service uses the data available from databases maintained by official Internet Registries (i.e : .DE, .Com, .Fr…) whose main purpose is to determine who is the owner of any given domain name. « Over the years Whois Services have been used more and more by a variety of Internet stakeholders, from domain name buyers to law enforcement officers » comments Xavier Buck, CEO of EuroDNS « by regrouping the data provided by more than 50+ Registries in one convenient interface, we will enable users to do much more than that ».
EuroDNS Launches whois.de
Registrars
jscowen writes …
Attn Aussies: Current .com.au prices
I did a quick run around all the AUNIC accredited registrars (not resellers) earlier today, thought I’d share what the current prices are.
NamePros.Com - Attn Aussies: Current .com.au prices
Registrars, ccTLD