Donuts Inc being linked with Spammers an article in todays Washington Post goes into details about Donuts Inc bidding for new GTLD’s and spending $57 million dollars to become the operators of the new GTLD’s such as .doctor, .school. and many more…
The article isn’t stating that Donuts Inc are spammers but suggest that some of the founders who were with Demand Media previously have been involved with spamming the internet according to the post by allowing spammers to register domains via enom.
Jonathon Nevett, a Rockville-based lawyer who is one of four co-founders of Donuts. is quoting as saying. “We and our very smart investors would not have spent almost $57 million if we had any concerns that we were not eligible,” in reference to running and operating the registery that shall run these GTLD’s.
Donuts Inc are facing competition from the like of Google, Amazon, and individual companies hoping to run the registries themself with some such as Amazon stating if they won they wouldn’t sell and domain to the GTLD’s and use only for their own purposes.
The decision shall be led by ICANN who will choose who they deem fit to run the registries for each new GTLD’s that are approved.
The article goes into more detail here. “The complaints about Donuts stem from its relationship with Demand Media, a major player in Internet services that pioneered the creation of content linked to popular search terms, leading to a proliferation of Web pages on almost any imaginable subject (sometimes disparaged as “content farms”). Demand Media also owns eNom, the second-largest Internet registrar , selling more Web addresses than any company other than Go Daddy.”
It then goes onto read that “Industry watchdogs have long criticized Demand Media as a leading provider of services to spammers and a host to sites that commit “cybersquatting.” The term refers to Web sites that seek to fool consumers who type in the wrong Internet address for a company into their browsers; instead of the intended site, they can end up on one that looks similar but that can be a gateway to fraud.
Garth Bruen of the industry watchdog group KnujOn said Demand Media has not replied to any of the many spam complaints he has submitted to the company.
“They are looking the other way,” he said. “I’ve sent them tons of information. They never respond. They have this one address, legal@enom.com, and you never get a person.”
Kristen Moore, a Demand Media spokeswoman, said the company works with several groups to monitor spam but does not have records of complaints from KnujOn. “Combatting rogue and illegal operators on the Internet is a challenge that we take very seriously,” Moore said in an e-mail.
Two of Demand Media’s top executives, Paul Stahura and Richard Tindal, left the company in 2009. In 2010, they co-founded Donuts to compete for the new top-level domains being created by ICANN, raising more than $100 million for the effort, according to the company.
Stahura and Tindal were joined by Nevett, who was chairman of the board for an eNom joint venture. Also joining Donuts, as chief financial officer, was Kevin Wilson, the former CFO for ICANN.
Few had heard of Donuts, based in Bellevue, Wash., before ICANN announced in June that the company had made 307 bids for new domains. For nearly half of those — including “.attorney,” “.mortgage” and “.medical” — Donuts was the sole applicant, putting it in position to emerge as the world’s biggest provider of new Web domains.
The connections to Demand Media also became clearer when that company announced that it had shared rights to 107 of the domains for which Donuts has applied. (Demand Media has separately applied for 26 top-level domains, including “.army,” “.gay” and “.republican.”) The two companies also have a deal for Demand Media to provide technical services to any of the new domains that Donuts wins.”
So what do you think, should Donuts Inc be chosen to run these new gtlds is this a good move by ICANN?
At the end of the day they aren’t Spammers themselves it is the individual that registers the domain who produces the content that spam, Maybe Donuts Inc needs to closely monitor what happens to each domain they sell but if they sell millions of domains or even hundreds of thousands of domains you still cant stop someone writing a program to send spam…