 Not fun to announce and definitely a loss for all of us at Bido. Ron Jackson, DNJournal founder and Bido.com Co-founder, for personal reasons elaborated below, decided to resign. We wish Ron the best and truly understand and respect his decision.
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“As cited by the New York Times, Engine Ready analyzed 18.7 million visits in a span of two years on web sites run by 27 of the company’s 500 clients. The study compared how customers react to paid listings and organic search results.
Domain Bits has a story about stolen domain names at Domain Name Forum. “In this case, “jayspot” of DNF purchased the domains pornos.com, liveporn.com, and asianxxx.com from “Alexa the Top”. Jayspot paid $115,000 for the first two domains, and paid via Escrow.com. He paid $8,500 for the third domain - $3,500 via Western Union to Alexa the Top and $5,000 via wire to the TD Canada Trust bank account of one “Ehsan Mahpour” in Toronto. The sale was brokered by “9MM” of DNF, who received the domain fucked.com as his commission.”
 The United States prides itself as the guardian of free speech on and off the Internet. Countries such as China may censor the Internet, and otherwise-civilized nations such as Germany or France may attempt to block what they view as unacceptable material, but the United States of America likes to think of itself as a place that doesn't censor people online.
Unless of course you happen to own a foreign travel business that offers trips to Cuba. Under such circumstances, as Steve Marshall discovered, all bets are off.
Steve Marshall is a British citizen living in Spain. For the past decade, he has operated an online travel agency that specializes in selling trips to Cuba to various European nationals. Marshall operated a number of Cuban-specific web sites, including several that focused specifically on the literary and historical aspects of Cuba, and maintained them in English, French, and Spanish. The Internet Archive has some of Marshall's web material on file. The sites themselves don't appear to have been particularly well-designedâboth Flash and text ads aboundâbut there's no evidence that Marshall failed to provide the services he advertised.
According to the Department of the Treasury, however, Marshall and his business helped Americans evade the US embargo against Cuba. A 2004 DoT (Department of the Treasury) press release stated: "This travel provider is not only a generator of resources that the Cuban regime uses to oppress its people, but it also facilitates the evasion of U.S. sanction policy." The PR goes on to assert that Tour and Marketing International Ltd. (Marshall's company) advertised itself as the number one agency for American travelers, claimed it could serve any traveler, and insisted that Americans interested in traveling to Cuba use the company's online payment system.
Marshall's domain name registrar, eNom, is based in the US. It apparently didn't learn that his company had been blacklisted for two and a half years. When it did, however, the registrar promptly shut down Marshall's sites without notification and has since refused to release the domain names to him. Marshall has since rebuilt his business using a European registrar and the .net rather than the .com suffix, but his experience raises troubling questions.
As previously noted, Marshall is a British citizen operating a business from Spain, with servers located in the Bahamas. He does not claim that no Americans ever visited Cuba, but he has stated that he was uninterested in marketing his services to the US. In this case, the Department of the Treasury was able to shut down his business without notification or negotiation of any sort. Even if he wanted to appeal the decision, Marshall has no organization to which he can appeal, save his registrar, which can simply claim to have been following government orders.
If the US intends to continue presenting itself as the guardian of Internet rights, situations like this require a bit more delicacy. By effectively shutting down Marshall's business, the United States has committed the censorship it condemns in other nations. Even worse, the Department of Treasury effectively shut down an international business without any type of due process. Both France and Germany followed a court process when investigating Yahoo for alleged improprieties, and the company in question (Yahoo) had the opportunity to respond to the charges in a court of law. Marshall was afforded no such luxury.
While the Internet may be global in nature, foreign companies may very well limit their use of US registrars and hosting services out of concern that activities targeted at other countries could be shut down here.
Further reading:
New York Times: "A Wave of the Watch List, and Speech Disappears"
DoT Press Release: "Treasury Identifies Cuban Online Travel Agency Targeting American Tourists..."
According to the newest post on The Lowdown by Ron Jackson, the Internet Commerce Association has just released vital information that will help domain owners protest anti-domainer language in the controversial Snowe Bill.
The ICA also posted information on how concerned Americans can get in touch with their respective senators to fight this bill. The ICA highly encourages citizens to utilize this information since the Senate is only in session for one more week before going into recess for the entire second half of March.
For more, click here.
Source : DNJournal â With Ron Jacksonâs Permission â March 9, 2008
What is your domain name worth? Premium domain names have been sold for millions of dollars and sales of domains continue to attract new investors every day. In today’s lackluster economy, this is one of the very few industries experiencing a tremendous growth and global interest! To give you a better feel for what premium domains are worth these days we are bringing you a chart with the highest publicly reported domain sales for 2007 & 2006. Information courtesy of DNJournal.com. Click on (Read More…) to see the charts. |
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