Rocket.com domain name changed hands for USD $14 million

According to a financial filing today by the seller of the Rocket.com domain name, L3Harris:

“For the quarter and three quarters ended September 27, 2024, includes $14 million of income net of related expenses from a domain name sale.” (page 29)

Clearly, that is a reference to the Rocket.com domain name transaction.

While I continue to be “on strike” due to the ongoing and widespread parasitic “journalism” in the domain name industry, I’ll make an exception for this 8-figure transaction.

In my personal opinion, this domain name sold for far too little, and the seller should have negotiated a much higher transaction price, given the market cap of the buyer.

[NB: Like the Voice.com $30 million deal, this disclosure revealed the net proceeds received by the seller. The buyer may have paid more than $14 million (as it appears the seller paid commission expenses, i.e. the “net of related expenses” language above), but that value isn’t public as of this point. It might come to light in a filing by the buyer at some point, although this transaction would likely not be considered “material” to them, given their market cap.]

AI-generated Audio Podcast about ICANN IGO Issues and Domain Disputes

(if you’re having trouble using the media player, the MP3 is here)

In January 2023, I submitted extensive comments to ICANN, regarding IGO Issues and domain name disputes. There were 3 quite detailed PDFs in that submission (as there were other comment periods over the years), that many may not have read.

Using the NotebookLM AI tool I mentioned in an earlier post today, that generated an excellent podcast regarding domain name transfer policy, I figured I’d let the AI summarize my IGO-related submissions. The result is the embedded audio in this blog post. It did a fairly good job of explaining things at a high-level, although it missed an important detail, namely that IGOs are able to assert immunity when they’re the defendant, and thus the “role reversal” gives them a big advantage (especially if they’re no longer agreeing to the mutual jurisdiction clause). I hope this piques the interest of those who’ve not followed this important issue, and causes them to dive deeper into the PDFs (which have more detailed arguments).

 

 

Push system for domain name transfers already in place for .co.uk!

Theo Develegas, the author of DomainGang, has a personal blog. He wrote about a .co.uk transfer today:

https://acro.net/blog/enom-end-of-an-era-the-fastest-domain-transfer-ever/

which noted:

What surprised me was the way .co.uk domains are transferred to another registrar, in this case Spaceship. After unlocking the domain, I went to Spaceship to begin the transfer out which required to copy an IPS tag into the domain’s record.

What is an IPS tag for domains, you may ask. It’s like a reverse authentication code: You get it from the registrar you move your .co.uk domain to and provide it to the registrar where the domain sits at.

The moment the IPS tag was updated at eNom the domain was no longer there. It was an instant change of registrar! All I had to do next was complete the transfer at Spaceship by submitting the request. The domain appeared in my account, once again instantly.

That’s the kind of “push” system  for domain name transfers that I’ve been advocating for more than 2 years at ICANN, for gTLD domain names like .com. It’s already in production. There’s no excuse now for ICANN not to adopt this, at least as a pilot project, for gTLD domain names.

 

AI-generated Audio Podcast about ICANN Transfer Policy

Prepare to be blown away! 

As regular readers of this blog will be aware, I’ve written extensively about proposed changes to the ICANN Transfer Policy.  Last week, I blogged about my 2024 submission to ICANN. It also mentioned my previous extensive submissions in 2022.

Today, I read about an interesting AI tool created by Google called NotebookLM which is able to summarize documents and even create audio podcasts. So, as an experiment, I uploaded my 2024 and 2022 ICANN submissions into NotebookLM, and here’s the result (7 minutes and 41 seconds in length).

(if you’re having trouble using the media player, the MP3 file is here)

Isn’t that simply incredible?

Continue reading “AI-generated Audio Podcast about ICANN Transfer Policy”