Rob
Sherman Advocacy
Click on either picture for larger image and picture description.
Rob
Sherman Advocacy
Click on either picture for larger image and picture description.
"Fighting injustice, one victory at a time."
New domain name extensions are about to be released into the internet. Domain names are such things as www.RobSherman.com, www.cnn.com, www.uillinois.edu or www.whitehouse.gov. The extension part of the domain name is the .com, .edu or .gov part of the name.
Supporters
bring you Rob Sherman Advocacy.
Click here to join them.
New domain name extensions, including .biz, are about to be released to increase the availability of domain names for, among other reasons, legitimate businesses whose names have been reserved by cyber squatters. For example, Edgar Schlenker, of a purported business named Get Local News, is sitting on a number of web names that could be used by local community news organizations but which Schlenker registered before the community news organizations with those names got into webcasting.
One of the names which Schlenker has registered is www.liberalnews.com. He's not using liberalnews.com for anything. He's just sitting on the name.
I'd like to register the name of my webcasting business, Liberal News and Commentary, as a Dot Com. Mr. Schlenker has offered to sell LiberalNews Dot Com to me for $5,000.00, but I'm not going to give a cyber squatter five grand for registering, for financial speculation, the name of my business before my business was created. To me, that's extortion, and I don't cave in to extortionists.
With Dot Biz, I won't have to deal with guys like Schlenker. However, the company that is handling Dot Biz domain name registrations is apparently attempting to do a little profiteering of its own.
This week, I received an e-mail letter from Network Solutions. The Subject line said, "ACTION REQUIRED: News about your .biz request."
The letter started out reasonably enough, with a header that said, "Take the final step in requesting your .biz name." It went on to say,
Dear Customer,
The response for .biz
domain name requests has been overwhelming, and we’re just days away from
submitting these requests to NeuLevel, the .biz Registry. But before we submit
your request(s), we need you to take one last step.
NeuLevel is requiring a processing fee for each .biz domain name application. So
we need you to go online to our Account Manager and verify your credit card
information, then select the domain name(s) for which you’d like to submit an
application. We will then apply a minimal $5 per domain name application fee to
your credit card. Be sure to have ready the account number (deleted) and
password you were provided when you first submitted your request(s), then click
here.
If you do not have your password, please call customer service anytime Monday
through Friday at 1-866-418-3684 (in the US and Canada), or 1-703-326-6219 (if
you're outside the US and Canada) and ask for your "New gTLD account
password."
Here is where they went for the scam:
|
|
|||||
|
||||||
NeuLevel's proposal is not "like" a lottery. It is a lottery. It's a private lottery for money, and as far as I know, that's illegal, where a business is selling you chances to obtain something that you want.
NeuLevel could make a ton of money selling chances in this lottery-for-bucks. If some guy like Schlenker buys 99 chances to obtain liberalnews.biz so he can sit on that name, too, and I buy one chance for five bucks, my chances of getting to use my name is just one in a hundred, while his chances would be 99 out of a hundred that he could screw me out of my name, yet again.
Meanwhile, NeuLevel hauls in the bucks, perhaps millions or billions of bucks, in what clearly seems to be an illegal lottery scheme. If you don't like being squeezed by NeuLevel, too bad. Notice the last line of their e-mail letter: "Any replies to this message, other than unsubscribe requests, will not receive a response." In other words, if you want to object to be victimized by their lottery scam, they're not interested in hearing about it.
I contacted the office of the United States Attorney in Chicago to ask that they look into whether or not what NeuLevel is doing is an illegal lottery scam. They casually suggested that I print out the letter from Network Solutions, mail it in to them with a cover letter, and they may get back to me some day.
I've done that. I'll let you know if the US Attorney thinks that NeuLevel is doing anything wrong by selling chances in a private lottery, perhaps to the tune of tens of millions of dollars in underserved and illegitimate profit, and whether the US Attorney thinks that this type of multi-million-dollar scam is important enough to respond to.
Rob Sherman P. O. Box
7410
Buffalo Grove, IL 60089-7410
A post office box is used
because
the street address uses a curb mail box,
which is not secure.
Telephone: (847) 870-0700
Fax: (847) 870-1156
E-mail: rob followed by the at symbol followed by robsherman dot com
