DomainTools Blog

Domain owners that pay the renewal fee on their domain after expiration date and then transfer away from their current registrar are getting fleeced out of a year of registration. Under the right conditions and if everything aligns correctly we find that hundreds of transaction each day are being deprived of a paid domain year. I confirmed my finds when I found Pat Kane the Director of Business Operations of Verisign during the ICANN meeting in Lisbon. No registrar that I am aware of proactively provides a refund if the domain owner transfers away within 45 days of the anniversary of the domain creation and renewed after the expiration. I asked a few registrars and Elliot Noss the CEO of Tucows went on the record and said he would provide a refund when this edge case happened at Tucows. Mr. Noss doesn’t believe that many domain owners experience this at his registrar because their transfer policy allows domain owners to transfer out after expiration. At a registrar like Godaddy the edge case may happen a lot, if a registrar blocks the transfer during the grace period until the domain is paid for the case will happen more often.

However a lot of registrars do not allow owners to transfer out after expiration, instead they insist that the owner renew the domain name because it is past expiration, after the renewal they will not block the transfer. But their is a huge problem with this, Verisign refunds the money to the original registrar for the renewal if another registrar transfers the domain away in this window. Verisign implicitly automatically renews every domain that expires, this is why the domain stays alive past expiration, it is up to the current registrar if they want to delete the domain. The only way Verisign knows if a domain owners pays is if the registrar doesn’t delete the domain during the grace period. So if a transfer goes out, Verisign refunds one year to the old registrar, even it you paid for it, it is refunded to the old registrar.

The Verisign accounting system that handles over 75 Million transactions a year has a flaw in it that some registrars may not understand how it works and generally don’t issue a refund when they are issued a refund by Verisign. The special circumstances are as follows: The domain is past expiration, the owner renews the domain at the current registrar, the owner then transfers away with in 45 days of the anniversary of the creation date.

Do not renew your domain at your old registrar during the grace period and then transfer out. Instead, directly transfer out or pay your renewal fee, wait until day 46 after the old expiration and then transfer out. You will loose one year of registration if you pay first then leave.

Verisign could fix the hole by requiring a registrar to send an explicit renewal command, but the command doesn’t exist right now.

According to the Official ICANN FAQ at http://www.icann.org/compliance/faq.html, it says:

My domain name has just expired. Can my registrar require me to pay for a renewal before I can transfer to a new registrar?

No. Your new registrar of choice can initiate a transfer request on an expired domain name once they receive the required authorization from you. Expiration or nonrenewal of a domain name is not a valid reason for denial of a transfer request.

Note that if the registrar has already begun the deletion process on the domain name and its status shows it to be within a 30-day Redemption Grace Period, the name must be .restored. by your current registrar before it can be transferred.

This loophole most likely exists at other registries as well because most registries are modeled around Verisign’s registry. However Verisign has the biggest marketshare of the other registries and so it could be costing consumers millions a year.

UPDATE: Key-Systems.net, an ICANN accredited registrar has been giving refunds to resellers since 2002 with a automated fix they added five years ago. But only to resellers under the RRPproxy and ISPproxy system not to retail customers. So it would seem some registrars know they should give refunds… however not one registrar does give refunds on an automated bases to retail customers.

Richard Lau from RegistrarManager.com also pointed out ICANN posted an advisory about this in 2002. When I personally asked Verisign and a few registrars about this issue not one of them recalled the advisory ( http://www.icann.org/announcements/advisory-06jun02.htm ).

Wired Magazine shows why Dot-Name’s whois policy is bad. The registry is based in the UK and they claim detailed whois violates UK privacy policy. While the UK government has never prosecuted a case against a registry based in the UK they still convinced ICANN that they should be allowed to bend the mandated whois service registries are required to run. So ICANN has allowed a special exception to the Dot-Name Registry. If you want detailed access to Dot-name whois be prepared to pay $2 for it if you go directly to the Registry. That will get you five passwords that are good for 24 hours. So I guess the UK privacy policy doesn’t apply if you make people pay for whois? I just don’t follow that argument.

Either way, I want to let people know about a special back door! You can get detailed Dot-Name whois for free. You will need to be a little technical and follow my instructions.

First do a regular whois on a dot-name domain. (Westerdal.name) If will appear like this:

Thin Whois Record

Domain Name ID: 2876621DOMAIN-NAME
Domain Name: WESTERDAL.NAME
Sponsoring Registrar ID: 30REGISTRAR-NAME
Sponsoring Registrar: eNom, Inc.
Domain Status: ok
Registrant ID: 2242453CONTACT-NAME
Admin ID: 2242453CONTACT-NAME
Tech ID: 2242453CONTACT-NAME
Billing ID: 2242453CONTACT-NAME
Created On: 2007-02-21T15:27:13Z
Expires On: 2008-02-21T15:27:13Z
Updated On: 2007-02-21T15:41:24Z

Locate the Registrar Field. Registrars are required by ICANN rules to display whois records even if the Registry doesn’t displays whois records like Dot-Name. So instead of looking up the detailed domain information at the Registry we will look up the detailed whois at the Registrar like Verisign has us do in the DotCom system.

Command Line: “whois -h whois.enom.com westerdal.name”
Presto!

Thick Whois Record

Domain name: westerdal.name
Administrative Contact:
Domain Hostmaster (hostmaster [at] ascern.com)
12806 22d SE PL
Bellevue, WA 98005
US

The Registrar will show detailed whois. You will be required to map Dot-name registrars to their proper registrar whois server however it should work if you figure out the mapping. I will put Detailed Dot-Name whois records on our development queue so that DomainTools showed Detailed records for free soon.

Guy Kawasaki sent me a free copy of his book before my vacation so it is on my list of things to read while sitting by the pool in Mexico. I came across page 35 the other day and I made a note to review it. The author, Guy Kawasaki runs Garage Technology Ventures in Silicon Valley and he funds start ups in the early stages. Guy was on the team that invented the first Macintosh, but since then he went on to start a VC company in 1997,  Garage has funded dozens of startups over the years. The advise he gives in his book was right on, so rather then summarizing it I thought I would share this page from his book.

Don’t Compromise On Your Name

A remarkable name for your organization, product, or service is like pornography: It’s hard to define, but you know it when you see it. Coming up with a good name is easier than creating a product or service, but you wouldn’t think so based on the atrocities out there. Spend the time and effort to come up with a good name - it makes positioning easier. Here are some tips for the process:

Have a first initials that’s early in the alphabet. Someday your organization’s, product’s, or service’s name will appear in an alphabetical list. Better to be early in the list than later. Imagine, for example, a trade show with a thousand exhibitors. Do you want to be in the first third or last third of the show’s directory? Also, avoid words that begin with X or Z because they are difficult to spell out after hearing them. For example, if you heard “Xylinx,” would you think that it’s spelled “Xylinx” or “Zylinx”?

Avoid Numbers. They are bad ideas for names because people won’t remember whether to use numerals (123) or to spell out the number (One Two Three).

Pick a name with a “Verb Potential.” In a perfect world, your name enters the mainstream vernacular and becomes a verb. For example, people “Xerox” documents - as opposed to photocopy them. More recently, people “google” words instead of “searching for them on the internet.” Names that work as verbs are short (no more than two or three syllables) and not tongue twisters. AWOA (a word on acronyms): Avoid multiple-word names unless the first word solid verb potential (for example, “Google Technology Corporation” would still be fine) or the acronym spells out something clever. For example, the name Hawaiian Islands Ministry, a parachurch organization that trains pastors and ministers, becomes “HIM” - a clever homonym with “hymn” and a play on “Him,” that is , God.

Exercise See if the name your’re considering works in this sentence: “______________________ it.”

Sound different (as opposed to “think different”). The name should sound like nothing else. For (a bad example: Claris, Clarins, Claritin, and Claria. It’s hard to remember which name refers to software, cosmetics, antihistamines, or line marketing. Even if you did remember, it’s likely that you would associate all four words with one category, and that can’t be good in three of four instances.

Sound Logical. In addition to sounding different, your names should also sound logical. That is, they should “match” what you do. A good example of this is the most clever examples of naming that you’ll come across. Take Geodude and Lickitung, for example. Ask your kids to show you the cards of the characters Beautifly, Delcatty, Flygon, and Huntail, and you’ll see what I mean about logical names and good positioning.

Avoid the trendy. With hindsight, we made two mistakes naming Garage Technology Ventures when we started in in 1997. First, we initially called the company, garage.com.” Unfortunately, dotcom acquired negative connotations when the Internet tide went out because it came to stand for companies run by people without business acumen in markets without business models. The second mistake was lowercasing the “g” in garage.com. It was silly act of pseudohumility, but those were silly times. The problem with the lowercase “g” was that it was hard to pick it out in blocks of text. The visual cue that the word was a proper noun wasn’t there - you’d think that someone named guy (sic) would know this. Also, no one could really figure out what to do when a sentence started with “garage.com” - should it be capitalized or not? The bottom line, in hindsight, is that you should come up with a name that will endure for decades, and save your cleverness for the features of your products and services. On the other hand, consider the name Krispy Kreme. It doesn’t start with a letter early in the alphabet, and both “crispy” and “cream” are spelled incorrectly. Furthermore, the company’s donuts are neither crispy nor creamy. What his proves is that if you have a truely great product, it can overcome anything. One last example: I saw a great name for a company in a restroom at the Calgary International Airport. The company sells billboard advertising space in restrooms, and its name was Flushmedia. Brilliant.

I think Guy is right on. Further, if you want to start a company I suggest reading the whole book, The Art of the Start. I already have a few companies that are past the start up phase but I was still taking notes on things I could improve and concepts that I could simplify. I think the second thing a company needs is a good domain name. The first thing need, the nameless company needs is the product or service. A new company is dead in the water without a good domain/name. I will touch on some of the worst domains I saw last week while at TechCrunch 40 in SF last week in a future blog post. You can almost predict failure by how bad a name is for a company.

While on vacation I had a little fun on a zip line cruising the jungle and crossing a few rivers. I was busy working because I was taking note that there are a lot of dotcom domains being used in Mexico instead of dotmx. My hotel was fiestamericana.com. The zipline company was canopytours-vallarta.com. I don’t remember any mx domains I passed, though I do recall seeing them.

Who owns one word generic domains? The easy answer is, Domainers. It was very cool to find that Matt Cutts of Google owns three domain names and one of them is a generic word. Dullest.com is a name Matt found one day looking through the deleting domain lists back in 2003, when he saw a one word generic domain drop he registered the domain pretty easily, there was no automated army back then snapping up every dropped domain. I estimate that the domain is worth about $3,000. Had Matt worked harder at picking up domains he may not need his day job.

So what is Matt doing with Dullest.com?
He has placed a robots.txt file on the server that blocks all search engine robots from crawling his site. The one word website that says, “Arouw.”, I have not figured out what that word means. It is not french, so I think it is a fictional word. Is Google testing to see where that made up word gets copied too?

Matt’s most famous domains.
MattCutts.com is the most famous domain that Matt owns, he started a blog that talks about his experiences and sometimes things he is doing at Google. He is an unofficial spokesperson for Google because he understands the engine under the hood and knows how to speak in public. He also worked at the Department of Defense while in college and had Top Secret clearance which demonstrates he knows how to keep a secret. Matt started blogging so that he could see the same issues that webmasters had. He became a webmaster so that he could walk in their shoes.

The third domain.
Matt tracks down a lot of dirty SEO people. So I think he registered ShadySEO.com because he wants to secretly be one. It is that or perhaps he will publishing a list one day with all the SEOs that he has taken down and dumped out of Google index. Or perhaps “Shady SEO” will be the name of the book he writes one day. Registering a concept or idea years before you do something with it is required now days. I guess we will wait and see what he does with the domain.

What domain should Matt get next?
I think Matt should park a domain name. He would experience what domainers experience. Matt has stated that he will not run Google Adsense because it is a conflict of Interest. He thought about running Yahoo’s ads but I haven’t seen any on his website. I think he would be ok running a parking page that was powered by Yahoo. I bet he would make a dollar a day just because he owns the domain and people would check it out. He Matt, why not park Dullest.com and get it banned. Then try pulling it out of of the bad and building a website on it. It would be an interesting experiment that would get you closer to what we experience and perhaps Google would change the way they do thing for the better because of your experiences.

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) looks like they are in whois hot water. John Berryhill reports that the whois record for the group that administrates arbitration on people’s domain names has an invalid phone number. WIPO list a phone number of 999-999-9999 as their Registrant phone number. Part of the obligation every domain owner has to ICANN is to keep their records accurate and up to date. Failure to do so can result in deletion of the domain by their registrar if ICANN received a report of invalid information. John has already reported WIPO for bad data. It is not required that a registrant even share a phone number. It is only required that the administrative and technical contacts have phone numbers. However on the reporting tool there is a space to report invalid phone number for the registrant.

John Berryhill is an attorney that specializes in domain names. He once defended a client that was using proxy whois. The person who filed the complaint at WIPO cited proxy whois as evidence of bad faith. Mr. Berryhill then submitted WIPO.org’s whois record to the panel stating that WIPO had proxy information as well. I think the argument was made. Having proxy whois is not bad faith however WIPO updated their whois record to remove the proxy information.

Who are the Whois Police? Well that would be ICANN. They ask the registrar to take action within 15 days. I checked out ICANN.org’s whois record and oops. They seem to have an error too. ICANN’s zipcode is 90292 but they list 92092. Their error has been there for a few years. I reported it once but it never got fixed. I guess I should use the inaccurate whois reporting tool and see if ICANN will enforce whois accuracy against themselves.

Great video today. I had someone ask about this exact type of thing just today. Free Speech is protected and Yes you can use a Trademark in your domain. Read these comments on this post, they talk about this issue. It was nice to see my friend Milton Mueller in the video answering some of the questions. I had no idea he was involved in this case. This is a very well done video. Great editing work.

Here are some links to the sites in the video, Taubman Sucks and Shops at Willow Bend.

I think I have got about 6 calls in the last day from large portfolio owners. They want to know how to clean their portfolios. This is a hard question to answer because there is no good way to clean house. If you think you own a TM domain and don’t want the liability of owning it even if you delete it you can be sued. Domain Tasters sometimes own a domain for less then 5 days and get lawsuits months after they owned the domain. So if you have a portfolio and owned the domain for 2 years and delete it you are not sitting in the clear. Registering the domain is enough is to cause someone to sue you. So if deleting the domain doesn’t resolve all the conflicts how does a portfolio owner get clean. Let’s say you own 100,000 domains. You are likely to have at least 0.5% of the domains that can conflict with someone else. There will always be conflicts. The best advise is don’t sell off your trademark domains, delete them. The penny pitchers inside the portfolio companies really want to do this but it can really bite a portfolio holder in the end. When you are trafficking in TM domains and may bite the company in the end just as hard has holding them long term.

Mitigating liability is something that all portfolio owners should be doing. When one of the domains in that 0.5% percent hits you with lawsuit they can use your registration history, deleted domains, sold domains, and your current 0.5% of domains to paint a picture that you systematically target Trademark holders. If you park directly with Yahoo they have a tool that allows people to run domains against their trademark system. There can be false positives but at least it flags some of the domains and a human can walk through those instead of the whole portfolio.

Some portfolio owners are addicted to the cash of the TM domains. They transfer the domains to off shore sister companies. What a mistake, smart lawyers are not fooled by shell companies. If a portfolio holder always transfers to the same company the lawyer knows there is a good link between the two companies and can subpoena evidence to prove the theory. So don’t trick yourself to think you are clean if you divide your portfolio into two holding companies (Good Guys, Inc and Bad Guys, Inc.). They share money, they share assets, then the corporate veil can be pierced.

Offshore? There is no offshore. This is a myth. For Taxes, Yes. For lawsuits, No. Virgina is where the registry for DotCom is and a lawsuit in that federal court can get all assets both Good and Bad. So if you value your DotComs and don’t want to loose them you have to be completely clean and not hold bad liabilities.

When you delete a domain it can cause untold havoc. You are now putting a TM domain into someone’s Domain Tasting queue. It also makes the domain available to anyone to register. A newbie is going to pick up the domain and get struck by the lightning that you feared. In the ideal situation if you think you have a possible TM domain that you want to delete it would be nice to have a 501c3 charity like Mr. Peppler started called CarryOn.com that would hold possible TM domains. CarryOn.com doesn’t hold TM domains just adult domains. But a new charity could hold TM domains. The goal of the charity would be to direct domains to the rightful owner and try to give those domains back to the owners. The charity would not monetize the domains while they hold them. It would be great if Verisign was willing to be a major donor because a majority of the money the charity would operate would be for registrations paid directly to Verisign.

I would recommend any portfolio owner that has over 20,000 domains to get an outside audit on domains that they own every 6 months. If you get caught in a lawsuit that audit trail would be helpful to show good faith. When you judge and evaluate your own domains there is no outside balance and perspective.

With all the publicity on cybersquating and Microsoft trademarks. One would think only a moron would register a trademark of Microsoft. I think I found the biggest moron alive. He went out and registered every spelling error he could find of Microsoft. Talk about wanting to be hit by lightning. Kerry can I introduce you to Aaron Kornblum.

I think there is an endless supply of want-a-be domainers that just turn out to be Cybersquatters. My best advise to a new domainers is stay away from other people’s trademarks. If you have heard of a company or a product the best advice is to NOT register it. Find generic domains. Register local domains. I live in Seattle, so SeattleHousing.com or SeattleMenus.com are good domains to register. A lot of the good generic domains are taken but there are still a lot out there. Find them.

One of the things that has always bugged me about Marchex is that they try and hide what domains they own. It is not hard to figure out Marchex owns something. They have subsidiary called MDNH, Inc. If you notice the copyright in the bottom of one of their parking pages cites this company as the copyright owner of the parking page. MDNH is really a subsidiary of Marchex. Marchex has purchased a lot of companies and all of them seem to show the real whois. For the SEO company they own, TrafficLeader.com they show their real address: “Marchex Domain Admin, 413 Pine, Suite 500, Seattle, WA, 98101, US. Phone: +1.2063313300″. However on all the parking domains they own they hide who they are. For example they own MotherBoard.com, but they list their registrar’s proxy service: “Moniker Privacy Services, 20 SW 27 Ave, Suite 201,Pompano Beach, FL, 33069, US”. Marchex owns a lot of domains, why would a public company hide the fact they own over 100,000 domains. They mention it all the time in Press Releases however the whois is always hidden on those domains. Who or what do they think they are hiding?

Do they think they will rank better in Google.com’s search engine if they are not listed on the whois record? The answer is no but I think they internally believe yes. It is creepy that a public company wants to play shell games. It almost seems certain they must have skeletons in their domain name closet when they try to conceal the identity of almost every parking domain they own.

Marchex, I suggest if you really want to hide domain names, don’t resolve to IP addresses that have been allocated to you by ARIN. It is a dead give away.

Second, we know you always use the same set of name servers.

Name Server: A.NS.ULTSEARCH.COM
Name Server: B.NS.ULTSEARCH.COM

Third, there is whois history on every valuable domain you own. We know you own it. Stop trying to hide. It is like hiding an elephant behind a toothpick. Why bother? It just makes your company look shady.

Forth, the attempt to hide your identity by using multiple registrars and different proxy services at each registrar is just plain obvious. Is that suppose to be clever?

When people question if Marchex is engaged in Search Engine Arbitrage. You can’t put it past them, they seem like they are on the shady side of things. Does Marchex use arbitrage to pump up quarterly results and show more revenue? Marchex doesn’t disclose a lot of things but one can only wonder.