It’s been a wild week for online poker –  the landscape has changed, for all players, in a way that certainly seemed unimaginable only a few weeks ago.  With the aggressive actions of the US government against both PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker –  as well as Absolute / UB Poker –  the industry has been forced to react in very extreme ways.

Perhaps the best example of the chaos involved in the events of Black Friday: The need for poker powerhouses PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker to find entirely new web homes.  Part of the action against the sites involved the effective seizure of their domain names –  accomplished due to the influence the US has over the TLD registrar for .com domains.  That meant visitors to PokerStars.com would find only a notice from the Department of Justice instead of the familiar face of Daniel Negreanu –  and this meant visitors from all over the world, not just those from the US.

What choice do you have if you’re over at Full Tilt Poker?  Your website is your bread and butter, the primary entryway for your player base and the embodiment, to many, of your actual online poker room.  Even though your servers that house game play are unaffected, it’s clear that something has to be done.  Something was done –  both PokerStars and FTP swiftly moved to new TLDs after the action by the DOJ.

PokerStars dropped the dot-com and took a name that couldn’t be as easily shuttered by the DOJ by unveiling their new www.pokerstars.eu site –  new address, but essentially the same house.  Full Tilt chose a similar path but took a different road by shifting to www.fulltiltpoker.co.uk, again selecting a TLD that was less vulnerable to intervention by US law enforcement.

Despite the seemingly minor change, you can believe that both rooms are absolutely smashed  by the work involved in such a switch.  Countless emails were no doubt lost in the transition, in addition to the thousands of affiliate links and organic links, now useless, to PokerStars.com and FullTiltPoker.com.  Those headaches only begin to scratch the surface of what was no doubt a costly and quite effective blow to the operations –  and bottom line –  of what were the world’s largest online poker rooms.

Will they ever regain their .com homes?  It should no doubt be an interesting issue, and certainly a warning sign to those companies from outside the US considering a .com address, as the once-sacrosanct pillar of the TLD world now seems quite a bit less stable than before.