An Apology To My Readers + Sponsors

Wow. A lot has happened since I wrote my post – An Industry Divided – on June 3rd before news of the .XYZ Network Solutions debacle hit. When I originally wrote this post, I, like many others in the industry did not have all the facts, and while I still don’t think we have all of the facts, I do want to take a step back.

I support anyone who wants to make it easier for people to get their great ideas onto a domain name they are proud of. I also like the idea of a generic gTLD which is why, like Andrew, Page and many others I came out in support of .XYZ and paid for every single .XYZ name I own (including paying the pre-reg fee of close to $400 for Morgan.xyz). I bought 31 .XYZ names in total with one more name Grants.xyz which should come over from the NameJet auction early next week.

I am really excited about the domains that I bought and from my understanding, .XYZ has been following in .CO’s footsteps and engaging with startups, creators, and innovators to put these domains to good use and build meaningful brands on them.

What happened with Network Solutions was news to me and I immediately responded to it on the comment section of my blog stating that I do not endorse this and that I wanted to get to the bottom of it. I want to make that clear to all my readers and sponsors in this post.

Since 2007 I have worked very hard to be incredibly transparent and to expose any person or company who I think is doing harm to our industry. Right now, like most of you, I don’t have all the facts, I can just go by what I read but I can tell you I’m not a fan of people waking-up to find domains in their account that they didn’t register. I am also very concerned about what happens a year from now if they didn’t notice they got them and are suddenly hit with a renewal fee, this would be terrible.

So I wanted to apologize to both my readers and sponsors for supporting anything that would hurt them, our industry, or any of the hard working visionaries that I look-up to like Jeff, Colin, Frank, Dan, or Paul and many others. Now I think it’s time for us to get the facts together and figure-out what is going on here. Many of you have asked me to ask Daniel questions about this and I encourage you to write these questions in the comment section below. I will do everything I can to get Daniel to answer these questions so we can get this all sorted-out.

As always I would like to thank you for reading my blog, many of you have been on this journey with me for six or more years now. This is my first apology post, and since I’m planning on blogging until I’m at least 105, it might not be my last. I will never be embarrassed to admit when I am wrong, nor will I defend anyone just because they are a friend of mine if I don’t agree with the way they are doing things.

That being said, up until this point I have really looked up to Daniel, he’s built amazing businesses and been a real mentor and friend to me. I don’t want this apology to come off as me saying that I don’t like Daniel or I don’t like .XYZ because that wouldn’t be true. I have been very excited about .XYZ and very excited about their plans to get this into the hands of people who will build great things on the net.

What I do want to say is that it’s clear my readers and sponsors want to get to figure-out what’s going on here and I want to do the same. I’m all for clever marketing and if that’s what this turns-out to be then hat’s off to Daniel and the team, but if this does end-up breaking any ICANN policies or hurting our industry I’d like to make sure we all work together to make sure this doesn’t happen again.

Now let’s get to the facts and make our decision based on that. Please feel free to ask questions for Daniel in the comment section below and let’s give him the chance to explain what’s going on here in more detail.

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton