This article was going to be published on Tuesday 29th September – but I pulled it down pending “unfolding events”. The iTWire article I refer to below was never re-published.
Hmmm. Anyway, here’s the article I was going to publish (on 29th), complete with the “spiked” iTWire story.
I was made aware of this article (written by David M Williams) which was published on iTWire earlier today.
http://www.itwire.com/it-industry-news/strategy/69623-the-dirty-world-of-domain-trading
Unfortunately, it has been taken down for some reason.
I approached Jonathan Gleeson from Netfleet to ask if they had anything to do with this, and he assures me they didn’t. He said they were in fact preparing a formal response for iTWire, and were surprised that the article had been taken down.
Anyway, thanks to a loyal reader, we have a cached copy for you. Hopefully we will see the original back up soon. The story was originally picked up by a number of aggregators as well.
Netfleet needs to do something very soon. They are clearly just hoping this will disappear.
Very interesting article about flybys.com.au though.
A contact at iTWire has indicated that the Editor has taken down the article until NetFleet and auDA have responded. This comment was also made “The article is off-line but not forgotten” – so we can expect to see the article back online at some point; probably with a response from Netfleet (which I think is fair enough).
Waiting on a response from Netfleet? Sounds like spin. We all know they have gone to ground in typical fashion.
More likely they where threatened and forgot their journalistic backbone.
As I said above, they did get an official response from Netfleet.
Seems to me that there may have been some pressure exerted not to publish (but I certainly hope I’m wrong).
I would have thought they’d re-publish given that they were waiting for Netfleet’s side of the story (which they gave). Netfleet’s admissions basically confirmed “an event did transpire”.
The prohibited misspellings policy is implemented poorly. It’s a list of 2500~ domains that changes often and you can find it here: http://auda.org.au/assets/Policies/Policy-2008-09-Prohibited-Misspellings/Misspellings-20150402.csv
If auDA don’t want certain domains to be registered, they should instruct the Registry to deny any create request on them. This is easy to develop.
Letting people register these domains and then policy-deleting them later only serves auDA and Ausreg as they still get their fee.
@Cam
I also raised the issue of Reserved Names at the Names Panel earlier this year. Classic example is AnzacDay.com.au. I wrote about this on May 4. http://www.domainer.com.au/general/prohibited-domain-names/
Everyone agreed something had to be done. Brett F made the sensible suggestion that it could be as simple as making domains in the list not available to general registration.
You can change the puppets and offer a new show but the puppet master still remains.
It’s a shame that ITWire ultimately didn’t publish the story even after the allegations in it have been publicly acknowledged as true by NetFleet.
Has there been any statement from ITWire as to why they (apparently) chose to bury the story?
The vanishing article has been covered again on another international domaining site, this time on DNW in an excellent article by Joseph Peterson:
http://domainnamewire.com/2015/10/19/australian-domain-market-up-in-arms-over-netfleet-bidding-scandal/