Look, if it were a simple “profits, profits, profits” situation (like with one letter .biz domains, for example), there would have been nothing negative to comment.  But there’s one huge difference between Neustar (the people “in charge” of dot biz and dot us) and DENIC: the german registry operates as a non-profit service provider. As a result, I have just one question for them:

Guys, What Were You Thinking?!

Here’s how things unfolded:

1) After the VW.de legal situation (VW won the domain in court), DENIC decided to let people register one character domains, two character domains, pure numeric domains and three character domains which were previously not available (com.de, for example)

2) It was obvious that people would be willing to pay top dollar for the newly introduced .de domains

3) DENIC could have helped a LOT of people if they would have done the smart thing by auctioning the domains themselves (TV.de went for $400,000 over at Sedo and that alone says a lot: there were millions of dollars/EUR on the table)

4) Ok, so there were obviously millions of dollars/EUR on the table. What did DENIC do? They set the table on fire by releasing them on a “first come – first served” basis!

5) Sedo jumped in and registrars started charging hefty fees (the natural reaction of a profit-driven market). The result: a handful of people ended up making a lot of money. End of story.

While it’s true that some companies will be donating a certain percentage of their earnings (and they definitely deserve credit for that), we’re talking about pocket change compared to the amount of money DENIC would have raised by auctioning the domains themselves.  Now someone from DENIC would probably offer an explanation similar to:

“It would have been complicated”

“There would have been a lot of technicalities involved”

“There would have been potential legal issues related to how the money is donated”

Dear DENIC, there comes a time in a person’s life when explanations aren’t worth squat. Maybe it would have been hard but you had the possibility to help thousands upon thousands of people by raising MILLIONS. Let me make myself perfectly clear:

You Should Have Made Things Happen. Period.

Stop for a second and imagine how much good you could do with $50,000,000. Now after doing that, do you still feel like listening to excuses? I didn’t think so.

Out of all possible solutions, DENIC chose the absolute worst. Think about all of the options:

1) Auction them yourself

2) So you wouldn’t be able to handle things technically? Ok, why not contact a few companies which would be able to help in exchange for some free press?

3) Is that also complicated? Alright, then just give Sedo 10% and let them take care of everything. That would leave you with 90%, not too shabby!

The list could go on and on and at the end of the day, we’re left with one question:

Who’s to Blame?

Sedo and the registrars for making a quick buck? Absolutely NOT! They’re profit-driven companies, they saw an opportunity and took action.

VW for suing them? Nope! Nobody forced DENIC to rush things.

DENIC? Yes! YES! YES!

The conclusion is (painfully) simple: Epic FAIL!

Why Did I Bother Writing This Post?

Anyone with half a brain will realize that other registries will also start releasing one and two character domains. Maybe next month, maybe next year but it’s obvious that it will happen again.

If the people behind at least ONE of them (one of the non-profit ones, profit-driven companies can obviously do whatever they want) read this, then I’m sure that the answer to the “why bother writing about this?” question is more than obvious.