ICANN Investigates Insider Domain Name Snatching

Tech.Luver sends us word that, hot on the heels of reports that Verisign may be planning to sell DNS root server lookup data, ICANN has opened an investigation into a suspected practice by registrars it calls "domain name front running." The suspicion is that insiders at some registrars are using information from whois searches to snatch up desirable domain names before interested customers can register them. Here is ICANN's announcement of the investigation (PDF). ICANN asks that anyone who suspects they have been victimized by domain name front running to email them with details.

Comments

Some proof

[suso]

I have proof of this happening and I'm sure others do too. We have two different customers that looked up domains to see if they were available, asked us to register them and before we could register them, they were already registered by places in China and the Carribian. Both domains where somewhat obscure and I didn't see any reason why they should have normally been bought. In both cases, the domain was released after the 5 day period that ICANN allows (which I think was a mistake on ICANN's part to have that policy). But in some cases it might not be released if it turns out to be popular. As I said about the Verisign thing, this is an invasion of privacy.

One of our customers (who allowed me to mention in this post that his domain in question was psysci.net) that had this happen said that he only used the command line whois and networksolutions.com to lookup the domain, so it might not just be small registrars involved in this scam. But that's a pretty serious accusation to bring against Network Solutions so take that with a grain of salt. THe company that tasted psysci.net had a name of Wan-Fu China, Ltd. The company that tasted the other domain had a name of (MAISON TROPICALE S.A.), which you can find a little more information about here

Not the Point

[mfh]

When a domain is snatched, usually it doesn't matter if the original owner gets it back or not. That's not the point, in most cases. Thieves will use the domain to drive traffic to their astroturfing/spam network and drive their PR up in the process. That stays in memory indefinitely and has a beneficial impact on any site like that.

If the owner gets their network back, they still have the stigma of the bad activity associated with the domain.

Preventing domain theft is going to only get increasingly more difficult as technology becomes more complicated.