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10|16|2009 03:58 pm EDT

Sedo to hold pre-release Auctions for newly released .DE names

by Frank Michlick in Categories: Up to the Minute

As per a comment on our post telling you about the release of fomerly restricted .DE domains, Sedo has now announced a pre-auction for those domains in conjunction with a number of unnamed registrar partners. The terms and conditions of the auction warrent a closer look.

In #2, Duties of Sedo, they basically tell you they have 14 days after the end of the auction to obtain the names for you, which is longer than it will take for DENIC to announce the results. Sedo reserves the right to potentially purchase the domain for your bid-price, should someone else win the name at the registry.

Paragraph #3.2 obliges the bidder not to try to obtain the domains outside of Sedo’s auction. Should the bidder be found in breach of this condition, Sedo is owed a penalty in the amount of the expected commission or 2,000 Euro. According to #3.3 the bidder also assures Sedo not to be infringing on the right of anohter party by registering those domains and idemnifies Sedo.

Xing Status Update by Tim SchumacherSedo is still looking for registrars to participate, as per a post of the Xing networking site by Sedo’s CEO Tim Schumacher, which states that registrars interested in participating should contact him.

In addition to all of this, insiders of the .DE namespace are expecting to see injunctions and cease and decist orders to be sent to DENIC early next week by many trademark owners who will try to prevent the release of domain names similar to their brands. Sedo also lists the domain name “vw.de” in their auction list.

Other registrars such as DomainFACTORY.de will charge a 25 Euro fee no matter if the registration is succesful or not. On top of that the customer has to place a bid to be on top of the queue. The additional money the company will earn will be donated to charity.

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  • https://www.xing.com/profile/Peter_Mueller29 Peter

    Hi,

    just to clarify why we charge a fee and auction the top of the queue: Each registrar will have a limit of 4 registration attempts per minute for the newly released .de-domains. With about 270 accredited registrars and a figure of about 800 to 1.300 high quality domain names getting released, the number of possible succesful registrations per registrar will be strictly limited.

    Keeping this in mind, auctioning the order of the queue for us seems to be the most “fair” way to handle the introduction of the newly available domain names as it gives those of our customers the best chances of getting their domain names who have the biggest interest in those names. To show that we see this as a service to our customers and not as a way to gain additional revenue we decided to donate these auction bids to charity – with the positive side effect of being able to do something good :-)

    Btw: A bid only has to be paid if the registration was succesful, if not we will only charge the fee of 25 €. And this fee only has to be paid if we really try to attempt registration for a domain name. If you’re not the highest bidder for a domain and your application is not forwarded to the registry, you won’t be charged at all.

    Best regards,
    Peter Mueller
    Product Manager domainFACTORY

  • http://DomainAuctionCleaner.com Drew

    No. DENIC figured out the FAIR way was to rate-limit the Registrars to ensure as many potential Registrants as possible got a chance to get a domain.

    You’ve decided to game the system, to ensure only deep pocketed Registrants get anything.

    >To show that we see this as a service to our customers and not as a way to gain additional revenue we decided to donate these auction bids to charity

    Ah. So DENIC agrees with me! Got slapped, did you?

  • https://www.xing.com/profile/Peter_Mueller29 Peter

    Hi Drew,

    actually it – theoretically – ensures that each REGISTRAR has equal chances to register one of the domains, not the REGISTRANTS. There are small registrars with a couple of hundreds of customers and there are big registrars with several hundreds of thousands or even millions of customers. The small registrars can serve a higher percentage of their customers than the big registrars.

    With such a big demand fur such few domain names there probably isn’t a real fair way for the registry and the registrars to get those names in the market – keeping in mind that DENIC had to act fast following the court decision for “vw.de”. That’s also one of the reasons why the registry hadn’t released those domain names in the past.

    But what we as a registrar can do is to make this process as transparent (I guess that’s the better choice of words) as possible for our customers. And that is what we tried to do and – hopefully – achieved.

    > Ah. So DENIC agrees with me! Got slapped, did you?

    For what? For not personally taking advantage of the situation? ;-) There are no special terms from DENIC for this landrush beside the usual terms and conditions for registering .de-domains and the technical limitations. There are registrars who give away the first places in the queue as we do but keep the revenue for themselves, there are registrars renting their entire registry system to other registrars for a couple of hours during the landrush. Some are trying to partner with other registrars as can be read above and there are registrars who do not participate at all…

    Best regards,
    Peter

  • http://DomainAuctionCleaner.com Drew

    Which is why ethical-less capitalism doesn’t work that well.

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