DotAsia CEO Responds to Allegations of Foul Play
Posted by Chief Editor , Wednesday, 14 May 2008
Last year, the excitement around the new .Asia TLD launch in June was followed by an announcement that Pool.com would act as the exclusive auction partner for the .Asia Registry during the sunrise (launch) period.
It is now being reported that "Lucky Rich" Richard Schreier, CEO of dotasia-auctioneer Pool.com seems to have won many top-domains for himself in those .asia auctions, by using bidding parties camouflaged as third party companies, but ultimately owned by Richard Schreier.
It is indeed odd that premium .asia domains, which can be worth millions, such as porn.asia, dating.asia, insurance.asia, lotto.asia, stocks.asia, auction.asia, beer.asia, fitness.asia, girls.asia, wine.asia ended up in the hands of the CEO of the "exclusive auction partner for the .Asia registry".
So far, complaints sent to Mr. Edmon Chung, CEO of dotasia indicate that he doesn’t seem to have any issues with this. His answer to these allegations can be read below…
"Hi Everyone, It appears that we have a disgruntled .Asia customer. We have and will continue to try to reach out to them regarding their issues and to attempt to turn a disgruntled customer around.
In case you have not came across the materials being propagated, there has been allegations about DotAsia (and Pool.com) about inappropriate behaviour in managing the auction process for the .Asia Sunrise. We would like to reassure you that DotAsia is committed to upholding the integrity of the registry and are confident that our processes including those with our service providers do not compromise our commitments. At this point, there is no evidence from our investigation suggesting that bidders have been advantaged or disadvantaged due to their relationship or non-relationship with Pool.com our auction services provider. We have also posted a special advisory regarding Auction Tampering on our
website . All .Asia Sunrise (SR2) applications are reviewed and verified by our Verification agents including Deloitte and AGIP. This further ensures the integrity of our process. This also explains that not all applied for domains will be accepted and not all accepted applications will go to auction. In fact, only a very small percentage of the received applications went through the auction process (which is consistent with our original expectations as well).
Furthermore, as in fact can be shown from my own response emails posted on the website making the allegations, DotAsia have been working hard to try our best to address the issues raised. Therefore, the characterisation of our non-action, in our opinion, is ungrounded.
Nevertheless, please feel free to contact me directly should you have any further questions.
Edmon Chung Chief Executive Officer
DotAsia Organisation"
We will keep you informed as this story develops of course… in the meantime, you can get more details at DotAsia-Complot.org and what you can do about it here.
Source: Chief Editor writing for DomainNews.com – May 13th, 2008
