Month: March 2022

Grove.com domain name acquired for $873,000 in 2019 by Grove Collaborative

In December 2021, Grove Collaborative announced their intention to go public via a SPAC. While Grove operates from the Grove.co domain name, they also own the elite one-word dot-com Grove.com (which simply redirects to their .co). Are we able to determine the acquisition cost of that  domain name?

As an aside, this domain name movement had been noticed in 2020 by Jamie Zoch, as noted on Twitter:

A recent SEC filing disclosed (on page F-26) the “purchase of intangible assets” in the amount of USD $873,000 in 2019. This was atypical, as there were no similar purchases in 2020 or 2021.

Using the WHOIS history at DomainTools.com, we can confirm that the grove.com domain name used to be owned by “The Grove Consultants” in 2019. But, the domain name then went into WHOIS privacy. Using Archive.org, we can see that the Grove Consultants changed their domain name to “TheGrove.com” in late 2019. By the start of 2020, the domain name’s redirection changed, so that it redirected to Grove Collaborative’s grove.co website instead.

Thus, I believe it’s safe to conclude that Grove Collaborative acquired the Grove.com domain name for USD $873,000 in 2019, albeit with a transition agreement so that the prior owners could redirect the domain name for a period of time. By 2020, the transition agreement had concluded.

ASAP.com and related domain names acquired for $3,006,000 by Waitr

In December 2021, Waitr Holdings disclosed that they were rebranding, and had acquired the ASAP.com domain name. This was noted on Twitter by Elliot Silver (and others):

This week, Waitr’s annual report disclosed that the acquisition cost of those domain names was USD $3,006,000. This appeared on pages 53, F-6 and F-22 of the SEC filing.

Normally, DNJournal doesn’t chart transactions where the purchase price is for multiple domain names (unless the value assigned to each domain name is known). However, given that the primary domain name that was acquired was ASAP.com, with the other related domain names not even mentioned in the SEC filings, I think it’s safe to conclude that the other domain names held negligible value.

Red Alert: Get your domain names out of the UK and Australia now!

If you are a domain name owner using a UK-based or Australian-based registrar, you should seriously consider moving your domains elsewhere, as you apparently have no legal rights to judicial review in their courts after an adverse UDRP or other domain dispute procedure. In other words, you are a second-class citizen if you’re exposed to registrars in those jurisdictions, compared to other jurisdictions in the world. I would strongly recommend that you move your domain names out, or at least get your own independent legal advice.

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Sham ICANN Working Group Plans To Trample on Domain Name Registrants’ Legal Rights

As I warned in October 2021, an ICANN working group intends to seriously jeopardize domain name owners’ legal rights. There was a call for public comments, and my own company submitted a substantial 54 page submission, as did others.

However, the working group just posted to their mailing list a draft of their final report yesterday (see the DOCX attachment at the bottom), one that is essentially unchanged from their highly criticized initial report’s 5 recommendations. IGOs are given new rights not present in law, and instead the rights of domain name registrants to due process are ignored.

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