Domaining, mobile tlds and automated whois queries
Domaining has been interesting me for a while. I think it mainly bugs me because I distinctly remember conversations from ~10 years ago about whether it was worth buying some generic .com domains that would be worth quite a packet these days. Darn it.
I don’t think the game is over, however, but it is taking (in my mind) two divergent paths:
- the .com tld and most cctlds look to me more like the (real world, bricks and mortar) property market - with money to be made in clever speculation but mostly in development. Buy a nice undeveloped plot, develop it and sell it for a multiple.
- new tlds, where it is quite hard to predict the future value of the domains (.biz??? please).
One area that is ripe for the picking in my mind is mobile. There has not yet been a winner in the battle for hearts and minds that is the mobile internet (m.example.com, example.mobi etc.?) but mobile domains have a few characteristics that are unique relative to the regular domain markets:
- shortness is (even) better
- all-number domains might make more sense because of the input method on many mobile devices
What am I doing about it?
Well, I spent a bit of time yesterday (yes, it was Sunday, I’m soo cool) writing a script to let me easily check the availability of some of the domains I’m toying with buying up. This highlighted a couple of issues:
- I don’t have £150k. Any investors out there with that kind of money who fancy dabbling, I have identified a mobile niche you could pretty much own with an investment along those lines… Drop me a line
- Automated whois queries are quite hard. Who decided that whois servers didn’t need to return information in a standard format? Nice one.
It’s not even easy to see if something is registered in an automated way (please, someone, correct me in the comments if I’m missing something):
whois -h whois.eu anunregistereddomain.eu:
Domain: anunregistereddomain Status: FREE
whois -h whois.dotmobiregistry.net anunregistereddomain.mobi:
NOT FOUND
whois -h whois.nic.tv anunregistereddomain.tv
No match for “ANUNREGISTEREDDOMAIN.TV”.
What’s that all about? Why not have a standard response?
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steve on Tue (8 Jan) @ 7:54 am
You’re right that short is good for a mobile domain, but I’m not sure that numbers would be better as on my phone it defaults to predictive text for domain entry, which makes numbers a pain. Also, I don;t have a spare 150k either so I can’t help there
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Graeme Coates on Tue (8 Jan) @ 9:26 am
RFC954, RFC1834 are the definitions for whois I think. Of course, they were written in 1985 and 1995, and there’s no defined replies as long as it indicates a zero query in some way. Plus now IANA no longer has control over all tlds, each registry “does it their own way” - but there must be a way of doing these searches in an automated way - in fact it’s been done within most internet registrar’s web pages (one plucked out of google: http://www.moniker.com/domains/batch_reg.jsp)
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Adam on Wed (9 Jan) @ 1:32 pm
Do no web based whois tools have an API?
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Will Critchlow on Wed (9 Jan) @ 2:26 pm
@Steve: good point about the entry of domain names - I had thought of that, but phones normally (!) have a good way of entering numbers so it shouldn’t be too hard. I’m still not 100% sold on numerical .mobi domain names, but it seems like it might work well. More thought / research needed.
@Graeme: I think the people who have ‘automated’ this actually just code around all the different ways that it is implemented for different tlds. I don’t see any good reason why the RFCs wouldn’t have a standard response for ‘no entry found’. Dumb. In my view.
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Graeme Coates on Wed (9 Jan) @ 5:00 pm
Think coding round each one is the only way (but a PITA nevertheless) - trouble is, in 1995 (and certainly in 1985), there was probably no reason for a common way to be defined, and so it never was. Ho hum.
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Will Critchlow on Wed (9 Jan) @ 5:43 pm
Good thinking, Adam. I don’t know. Should check it out.
They probably have quite low daily usage limits though. I’d be interested to hear if there are any…
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Graeme Coates on Thu (10 Jan) @ 9:39 am
@Will : Usage limits on whois also vary from registrar to registrar. eg Nominet have in their AUP:
“The maximum query rate is 5 queries per second with a maximum of 1,000 queries per rolling 24 hours”
Curiously, this is a “per-user” limit rather than per-IP address, though not sure how they determine that…!
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Will Critchlow on Thu (10 Jan) @ 12:23 pm
Yeah. A lot of the web-based solutions have even lower limits.
Maybe we need to become a registrar and get access to all the data. I think you only have to stump up £70k or something (per tld)!
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Bert Balliss on Fri (11 Jan) @ 5:39 pm
I think the answer is fairly obvious: because the whois servers don’t like automated queries. The last thing the need is someone scraping their databases and consuming their bandwidth and server resources.
It’s an interesting topic though. £1M spent now could be worth a hundred times that in a few years in the mobile domain market. Just goes to show, it takes money to make money.
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Steve on Tue (15 Jan) @ 8:11 pm
That sounds like a plan. Great post.
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Will Critchlow on Wed (16 Jan) @ 8:30 pm
I’m sure they don’t like automated queries, but different output by different registrars seems to me to be a particularly clumsy way of limiting it…
I agree with your 2nd point though. Wondering about starting a domain name investment fund (only half-joking).