This is definitely a welcome move as Nominet currently has no obligation to close down criminal websites, but the Serious and Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) wants things to change.  Not everyone is welcoming the news however.  David Harris, an IT lawyer and barrister told the BBC “In a world of online retailing, the ability for a police officer to seize any business, whether that is blocking a domain or seizing the servers – pre-conviction or certainly pre-warrant – would be a dramatic change in the relationship between the police and the Internet community.”

While this is of course a very good and serious point, the move is being broadly welcomed from other quarters, so long as it comes with judicial oversight but there are some serious flaws to consider.

The most obvious is that such a move would need international agreement at government level.  At the moment criminals would just register a new domain or avoid .uk domain names altogether.  Thus the police would have no way to shut the sites down.  The second flaw is that these domains will only be able to be shut some time after they have already done damage.

It can be extremely difficult to detect criminal websites early on though online security companies do make a good job of detection.

SOCA’s move is an important first step and now needs to be picked up by the British government and discussed formally at the United Nations.  Then perhaps in a few years we will be able to see Internet security firms, international law-enforcement, domain registrars and web hosting companies working together for the greater good.  This one won’t be easy to thrash out however.

There are however only a few software programs available that can lookup domain name registration information. The Domain Name Status Reporter supports the most popular domain name extensions like com, net and org but also country specific domain name extensions such as de, ca or fr.

It is possible to add new domain extensions in the options. All it takes is to enter the domain extension and a whois lookup server that is providing those information. Domain names can be entered manually or automatically from a text file. Each domain name will be listed in a table that is displayed in the main interface.

A click on Lookup All will perform the domain name registration lookup. The program will display if the domain name is available or taken. If it is taken it will display information about the registration date, the domain registrar, the domain expiration date and the last domain update.

The program is missing the means to automate the lookups so that the added domain names would be regularly checked.

Many people own lots of domains which they keep around to sell at a higher price, or they simply haven’t gotten around to developing it, and as such, the “weight” of these webpages are lost, even if someone gets to the page they’ll just see an empty canvas, or some sort of “pricing inquiry notice”.

In this case Google Adsense for domains is a great resource for grabbing that extra buck, since it’s set and forget you won’t really need to do anything, and in the end if you only get a few dollars daily from it, it’s still better than nothing, and lets you use your domains to their full extent.

The interesting thing about Google’s system here is that it differs from the usual select an ad and show method because of the specialized nature of parked domains. In fact, you will have to create CNAME records and configure some stuff at your registrar, only then can you customize and choose keywords. Following all that, your domain will have a sleek Google-like look, with keyword relevant ads served, so ideally this should be a page worth something, even if all it has is ads (it will also have a search box).

I am interested to try this out in practice, I have a couple of domains standing still, although I am not totally convinced about the money making capabilities here, I think you can make more by actually developing a site. Obviously I don’t have as much time as I’d like, so this will be a fun project. If you have some experience advertising on parked domains please share with us!

Another option that speeds up the process quite a bit when working on the Internet is the Domain Lookup add-on for Mozilla Firefox. It does not automate the whole process but provides enough automatism to be a great asset for every webmaster or domain hunter.

Domain Lookup can send the marked text to a selected domain registrar checking if the domain name is still available. The query will be opened in a new tab. Spaces will automatically be removed from the query: “business news” would be stripped to “businessnews” since domain names cannot contain spaces.

The fastest way to check the domain is by using the shortcut key [CTRL SHIFT D] which can be edited in the options. It is furthermore possible to use the right-click context menu to start the domain search.

The default registrar Godaddy can be changed to numerous others depending on the user’s preference. The author explicitly states to let him know about missing registrars so that they can be added. The list is pretty extensive though.

It is also possible to select the domain extension or multiple extensions that should be checked. The default extension is .com but it is possible to add additional extensions including several country domain extensions.

Selecting multiple domain extensions can have the consequence that multiple tabs have to be opened to check the availability.

Now everyone can bid for a new domain name extension which will cost a minimum of $100K. In addition, applicants must be
capable of operating (or paying someone to operate) registry services. This makes it likely that only corporations and current registrars will bid for new domain name extensions.

It is most likely that some domain extensions will be registered right away, .blog or .wiki are likely candidates among others. It’s not clear if and how end users will be able to register domains with those new domain extensions yet. Will there be a pricing limit or will the new registrar be able to specify any price that he wants ?

Back to the initial expectation. If everyone can register new domain extensions expect to see a rapid increase in available domain name extensions. This will lead to a massive increase in domain registrations that make use of the new domain extensions. All popular dictionary words and short domains will be taken in no time and many of them will find their way into the search engines.

One thing that has to be considered though is how the search engines will react when new domain name extensions emerge. Not everything is set to stone yet and it will be interesting to see when ICANN announces the process formally.

It searches for domains that make use of both the domain name, subdomains, the extension and directories to create a del.icio.us domain name. In the case of del.icio.us del is the subdomain, icio the domain name and us the domain extension. The creating of those fun names is blazing fast and makes heavy use of Ajax to avoid page loading times.

One thing that’s missing however are actual lookups if the domain name can be registered. Domain finder presents all possible domain name combinations even if they have already been registered.

It would be nice if the lookup would be included. Another option that would fit well would be to link directly to some domain registrants to register the domain name if the lookup revealed that it was still available.

He posts some nice graphs there, for example the average lenght distribution graph which shows that most domain names have a lenght of 9 to 13 letters and that more than 250000 domain names exist that use 32 or more letters for their name. Would you be able to type the following domain name without error ?

WEBWEBWEBWEBWEBWEBWEBWEBWEB
WEBWEBWEBWEBWEBWEBWEBWEBWEBWEBWEBWEB.com

Last but not least he takes a look at names, that is male and female forenames and surnames and comes to the conclusion that a whooping 100% are taken. 15% of all combinations are still available to be registered. He also looks at the starting letter of all domain names and comes to the conclusion that domain names starting with S, C, A and M are the most common while domain names starting with Q, X, Y and Z are the most uncommon ones.