Everyone who follows the domain name industry understands that many registrars sell names at ultra-low margins and the upsell related services, like hosting and email, in order to make their profit. If you look around the registrar ranks, you'll see a healthy variety of add-on services at the point of sale. But I was surprised to see Dotster adding "Public Relations Services," including "Crisis Management," for its domain name customers. The prices are not trivial, but they're fixed, flat rate, which should be attractive to a lot of small businesses that don't typically need PR services.

Now that registrars are upselling services, I suppose the next offering will be legal services.....

P.S. In light of that last quip, I should add, in all seriousness, that I've been surprised a registrar hasn't offered "UDRP insurance" for registrants. I've long thought that this would be an attractive, profitable add-on for domainers with modest portfolios.

You've got to try the latest tool from the Domain Tools folks. It's called psychic whois. I could play with it all day.

Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" Speech, as a podcast. It's a repeat post from years past, but it never gets old. Listen to it again.

ICANN's Revised Agreement on .XXX: "A revised proposed agreement with ICM providing for designation of a .XXX sTLD registry is published for public comment. The public comment period will be open until 5 February 2007."

ICANN is now reporting: "The ICANN Board considered the [.XXX] agreement at its meeting on 10 May 2006 and voted not to approve the agreement as proposed, but did not reject the application. The applicant has continued to work to modify the agreement in order to address public policy issues raised by the GAC. ICM and ICANN Staff have been renegotiating a revised agreement in preparation for community review and board consideration. ICANN will post that agreement upon completion of the present round of discussions for public comment."

This is big news.

Happy New Year! And welcome to 2007, the year of new gTLDs.