The consequences of Nomer.com’s accreditation as Registrar

The .COM .NET .ORG (gTLDs – Generic Top Level Domains) obey the following structure: a single company is accredited by ICANN to administrate the main database of all domains registered of a certain extension, for example, VeriSign is responsible for the administration of the database of the following extensions: .COM and .NET. This type of company is called Registry, and it coordinates the concession and availability of a certain TLDs.

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  Fraud in Sponsored Links and how to deal with it

The Sponsored Links, a new kind of online publicity where the seller pays only when an internet user clicks their ad, is under a serious threat: the fraud. The Sponsored Links fraud endangers a whole industry that is growing around this type of advertisement. Google and Yahoo declared that they are paying the most serious attention to the issue and working on its solution. The fraud takes place when someone clicks the link without a real interest in the advertisement. The most common types of fraud are:

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The new Gold Rush

The American company Marchex has just purchased a portfolio with more than 100.000 domain names from the internet pioneer Yun Ye for USD 164 mi. This portfolio generates an income, through the Sponsored Links system, of USD 19 mi a month. This transaction illustrates the maturity of the American market regarding registry of domains and their monetization via Sponsored Links. The internet domain is becoming increasingly comparable to an asset, like a house, but instead of real estate it is virtual estate, an intangible asset that generates a monthly regular income.

This new perception of domain value has created a new gold rush in the international market. We are living in this true gold rush, in which more and more people enter the market looking for new opportunities. This has been evidenced by the incredible growth rates of the domain registry market, 30% annually. The main players in this game are:

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  Release of domain names from Registro.br and its consequences

Every five months Registro.br goes through a process of releasing of all the registered .BR domain names that have not been renewed by their owners. These domain names are made available in the market to be registered again. The process of releasing takes 15 days, when any person can order a ticket and request registry of the domain name to be released. In case the domain name registry has more than one suitor, it is not released to be registered and is automatically transferred to the next release process.
Registro.br has wisely created an alternative to solve the dispute: in case one of the suitors owns the registered trade mark at INPI or has been using a company name contained in the web address for more than 12 months, they may request from Registro.br an analysis for the concession of the registry despite the contestants. We can evaluate the consequences of this policy concerning the two main types of registry: brand domain names and generic domain names.
The registry of a domain name in which a brand name is contained is usually regularly renewed, unless the company has gone bankrupt or out of business. Therefore, the brand name domains hardly ever go into the release process and even when they do, they are not very disputed, since the brand name is valuable only for its owner. On the other hand, the generic domain names are highly disputed. The dispute owes to the appearance of Yahoo and Google's Sponsored Links and the partners networks. These networks allow any domain owner to make money by inserting ads in their website.

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  Perversion of the cancellation policy for com/net/org domain extensions

The ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), responsible for the domain registry infra-structure administration in the internet, created a cancellation policy that applies only to domain names ending in .com, .net, .org and .info. This policy came to be after an agreement between ICANN and the Registrars, companies specialized in registering domain names in a large scale, and allows the buyer to cancel a registered domain at no cost and up to five days from the first request.
At the same time, a new kind of advertisement strategy became popular in the Internet, the sponsored links. In this new business model, the advertiser only pays for an ad when an internet user clicks it (pay per click, or PPC), instead of the traditional price per print, or PPP. The sponsored links have become a hit for a number of reasons:

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