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Richard, as usual you were right on the money with this one. Being in Canada I didn't much pay attention to .eu, being disqualified due to living on the wrong side of the pond. BTW some of the later newscoverage on this .eu blackout says the evildoers are from the UK, not the US (damn, probably more typosquatters). I think the salient point here is that .biz and .info were gamed in the same way (I'm not talking about cybersquatting or anything like that), I'm talking about fake registrars lining up 20+ abreast. Crikey, Stalin woulda shot them for that. Russian proverb: under Capitalism, it's dog eat dog, under Communism, it's the other way around. So, despite the .eu having a blueprint about how the bad actors will likely behave, there appears to have beem almost nothing done to guard against it a few years later. In the real world this might be called incompetence. But to EURid's credit, as I say, at least they shut some down. I mentioned occaasional ICANN accredited registrar BondiLLc who gamed the system for .biz and .info and they either still own the names or have sold them downline, no doubt for a profit to a bigger fool. For those who don't know (and I apparently can't point to my article on that here since ICANNWatch changed their frontend), BondiLLC was a front for Marc Ostrofsky, who really got the dialing domains for dollars rush going by buying business.com and then selling it to himself through a front (d'ya notice how that word keeps coming up?) and then selling it again for a record $10 mill to eBusiness.com (and don't get me on the subject of those characters, just do a search on fsckedcompanies.com), some few of the details on business.com are here [webdevelopersjournal.com]. So what is that $10 mill doing for eCompanies now? Apparently [ecompanies.com] not much. And BondiLLC is apparently no [bondillc.com] longer an ICANN accredited registrar. Laughing all the way to the bank, sans ICANN sanctions, but not their profit. And, this is delicious, when I checked bondillc.com a week ago it was an entirely different site, mebbe it's those pesky name-drop-checkers or whatever having a go. Even more scrumpious, Marc Ostrofsky and the late Kenneth Lay (of Enwrong fame [wikipedia.org]) shared the same Houston lawyer. Y'know pardner, I gotta say they do everything bigger in Texas, with all due apologies to WMD Dubya. It would just be more more sporting if any of what they all spout was true. -g
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