Dot Asia released a press release about their successful auction

.Asia Auctions Fetches Over US$3 Million

.Asia Hot-or-Not Contest First Weekly Prize Winning Domain: resorts.asia
GMA2008.Asia Attracts Millions of Hits, Drives .Asia Adoption

Hong Kong, 16 June 2008 – DotAsia Organisation announced today total registration for .Asia
domains are expected to exceed a quarter of a million by the end of the first quarter after its public
launch . Proceeds from the .Asia Sunrise and Landrush auctions have already exceeded US$3M
and rising, demonstrating strong demand and growth value for .Asia domains. (more…)

DomainPulse reports:

China (.cn) has overtaken Germany (.de) to become the world’s largest country code for domain names. With an average of around 400,000 to 500,000 .cn domain names registered each month it would be safe to assume there are more than 12,300,000 names registered compared to 12,098,279 .de names registered at the time of writing.

The two ccTLDs (country code top level domains) are much larger than any of their competitors with the next ccTLD being .uk (United Kingdom) with 6,880,775 and close to three million .nl (Netherlands) domain names.

Of all TLDs, ccTLDs and gTLDs, only .com is larger than .cn and .de, followed by .net, while .org and .uk are roughly equal in fifth position.

The success of Germany’s country code has been due to few restrictions on the eligibility of registrants for .de domain names and a low price. Although France has a similar population, there are currently only 1,153,637 registrations.

These extraordinary registration rates are a result of extremely low reg fees in .cn domains. Regular domainers from all over the world can buy .cn domains for just $0.13 at a variety of sites. A predeposit is usually required.

Bigger resellers can get the domains for even cheaper paying just pennies on the dollar.

My guess is once the reg fees rise there registration counts for .cn will fall dramatically, unless we start seeing some high sales to support the tld growth

Some great domains are up for grabs at myid .ca auctions. Also a few more high sales from previous auction.

Gamble.ca, VP.ca, InternetAccess.ca, Bond.ca, Diplomas.ca, WebsiteHosting.ca, Macau.ca, and Bass.ca are some of the domains Offered.

More than 105 high quality dot ca (.ca) domains are being auctioned at MyID.ca including fabulous rare and previously unavailable gems that were registered as far back as 8 years ago in 2000.

Some premium domains on this auction list include Gamble.ca (Ultimate web destination for gambling and gaming), VP.ca (Unbeatable high profile two letter corporate domain), Diplomas.ca (Ideal for online education) and the creme-de-la-creme of financial domains, BOND.ca. (more…)

Here are the results from recent .asia auctions:

TOP 10 AUCTIONS
sex.asia $83,334
sexshop.asia $53,607
sushi.asia $22,500
cooking.asia $21,500
ace.asia $20,501
water.asia $19,388
outdoor.asia $19,019
promotion.asia $17,600
arts.asia $15,500
sales.asia $13,500

(more…)

159 L-L.ca Domains Available out of 676.

LLL.ca’s are selling for a min of around $100 and up and judging by the .com’s L-L usually sell for about 30% of LLL. The LL.ca - two letter Canadian domains are selling for 5-10k minimum now and this is out of reach for smaller end users, this makes L-L.ca the perfect candidate for that job.

See the current available list below:

(more…)

There are 1,426,613 .ru domains registered in total and 60,491 .su
.ru stands for Russia and .su is the obsolete extension of Soviet Union, which is still being used.

But the shocker is all 3 character .ru domains are registered! I could hardly believe that the first time I heard about it mentioned on NP, but a bunch of random checks show that this is true, most appear to be registered by one company: LEGATO LLC and were taken a month ago.

Personally I think the buyout is quite premature, there is hardly enough reseller interest to sustain market values above reg fee for these and it’s highly probably that they will all be dropped in a year, in a same way as it happened to LLLL.com around year 2000, when one company bought about half of them and dropped them a year later realizing it was a bad idea.

One thing is clear though - this should help push the LLL.ru domains prices up on the market. The current prices for these seem to be around $250 and up.

For comparison LLL.ca domains sell for a minimum of $100 now. Canadian tld recently passed 1 million registrations. LLL.co.uk names sell for $1k and up, there are currently about 7 million of them registered.

As reported by domainnews

When you read the minutes of ICANN’s Board meeting on April 30th, you come accross a section that describes RegistryPRO, the registry responsible for the .pro domain extension, and their request to change its registration agreement with ICANN.

The minutes indicate that, “The TLD has had limited success to date, with registrations in the low thousands.” Only a few thousand .PRO domains have been registered to date, primarily d (more…)

WHOIS: Protecting the Privacy of Domain Name Holders

CIRA is implementing changes to the dot-ca WHOIS search tool, effective June 10, 2008.

WHOIS is a common Internet search tool used to look up the contact information of domain name holders (Registrants). A search returns information such as name, address, phone and fax numbers, and email address. While WHOIS has been used since the inception of the Internet, recent concerns over privacy necessitated a re-evaluation of what information is publicly available in the dot-ca (.ca) WHOIS.

In January 2004, the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) took effect in Canada. This Federal law provides guidelines for the collection, use, and disclosure of personal information by private organizations. Under this act, the situations where an organization can disclose an individual’s personal information are strictly limited and require consent. (more…)

New high record set for .ca domains by Jobs.ca. The domain was reported to have sold for $600K to Ogopogo Media:

Ogopogo Media, an Internet media company that acquires and develops geotargeted destination and category specific domain names, recently announced it has acquired the rights to Jobs.ca from Domed Technologies, Inc. of Montreal, Canada.

The acquisition of Jobs.ca is the largest published single domain purchase in .ca history. The new ownership plans to create a job network, which will also include JobSearch.ca and Resumes.ca. (more…)

Sedo started recently a special auction for .nl domains

Some of the top names with current bids:

 huren.nl        17,777       EUR
wk.nl        7,777       EUR
planten.nl        5,000       EUR
reclames.nl        4,000       EUR
relatiegesche…        2,500       EUR
starten.nl        2,500       EUR
illustraties.nl        2,000       EUR
voornamen.nl        2,000       EUR (more…)