Tourism Body defends $100K website names

[DavidL]

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/06/17/2929329.htm

Read the comments. Unfortunately they are closed but yet again display terrible ignorance by the Aussie public....

It appears the previous owner was a legitimate tourism business in the NT with a full website going back at least 10 years. Doesn't stop the cybersquatter tag being thrown about by these ignorant fools.

Gems like:

this is a current legal type of extortion. There is land everywhere, yet there is only one trading domain name. Free enterprise, clever greedy tech heads or unempathetic vulchures? You decide....

(the poor previous owner has been running a website to support his legitimate tourism business for over 10 years - he's not even a domainer)

For about $1,000 a dispute over a claim for these domain names could have been arbitrated by ICANN with a good chance of success. The NT government was irresponsible to pay this amount of money as an effective ransom.

(ICANN arbitrate disputes do they?)

The federal government has openly encouraged domain name piracy, or "cybersquatting" in Australia, by the creation of auda, the body which actively encourages domain name piracy, wher people hijack domain names to which they are not entitled, and hold the domain names for ransom.

(Yes, we all know auda encourages domain name piracy!)

 

[djuqa]

Woohoo, I wish the NT government would pay me a BIG price for my nt-tourism.com

As to the mis-information , what as domainers, do we do to try to counter-act this perception. Most of the members of this forum have names which under close scrutiny would be classed as cybersquatting.

Even a Major Auction site promoted heavily here is advertising they now will market "auDA Policy" dropped/deleted names.

We, as a group of domainers, need to stop self-promoting and start informing the general public and NewsMedia about domains and their Legal usage/ownership/resale rules.

We all have at some stage had to defend our ownership of a name that some ill-informed clown thought "That they had a Right to Own"

 

[WG2010]

The majority of the comments are uninformed and seem to resent the fact someone got a nice pay day while they did not.

I often regret the fact that I missed so many good domain opportunities even though I've been online for ages(wasted my time playing Ultima Online then Everquest THEN World Of Warcraft! oh my). That doesn't entitle me anything nor do I resent those who took action and made $ from it.

I've not checked what the search volume is but it's obvious that if this is what people are searching for then the purchase will pay dividends in the long run for anyone involved in tourism up north.