Who-Is Queries – Shady Registrar Practices You Should Be Aware Of

I’ve heard a few horror stories before, people had called up another registrar to check the availability of a domain name only to have the registrar take the name and try to sell it back to the person who was inquiring in good faith for a premium.  Illegal?  Not according to ICANN.  Unethical?  You betcha.  Thankfully these sort of things are few and far between, and when you’re dealing with a legitimate and established registrar you won’t ever hear of that sort of thing happening.

What we’ve been seeing recently is a growing trend of front running by registrars.  This is when you do a Who-Is domain search for a specific name and the registrar turns around and registers the name (supposedly to make sure that nobody can take it from you) for a period of 5 days (called the add grace period).  This is completely allowable under ICANN rules.  However by doing this they are preventing you from taking that name to another registrar and purchasing it through them, in essence holding your new domain name hostage for a period of five days.

ICANN’s registrar agreements do not prohibit us from monitoring and collecting whois query data and either using it or selling it.  Webnames.ca itself does not subscribe to this practice; if you run a Who-Is query with us, you can be assured that it stays with us and we will not ‘reserve’ the domain name on your behalf for five days, or turn around and sell the query data to a third party.

If you’ve been reading tech blogs over the past few weeks, you’ll have seen a flurry of posts on this subject as well as an explosion of outrage.  In particular they’ve been focusing on Network Solutions, one of the world’s largest registrars and home of more than 7 million domains, who started front running domains mid December 2007.

I have to admit I was somewhat of a skeptic when it came to this, I wasn’t sure if the post I found was just somebody who had an axe to grind against Network Solutions so I did a little digging around on my own.  What I did was head over to their website and do a Who-Is search on a nonsensical domain name – in this case three words that I had put together, swimbiketours.com.  I did a search for it, sure enough it was available.  It’s what happened next that surprised me.

I navigated away from the page at Network Solutions, closing my session.  I went to Verisign and did a Who-Is query, sure enough my new domain name had been registered!  Not only was it registered, it was registered to Network Solutions with an expiry date of 2009 or what looked to be a year long registration.

The DNS record stated that it was created on 09 Jan 2008 and would expire one year later on the same day.  We’re also seeing another problem when it comes to this practice.  At the end of the 5 day grace period, domainers are grabbing up the domain names in the hopes of reselling.  It’s quite the viscous circle when all you wanted to do was perform a Who-Is check on a domain name you were thinking of buying.

There have been rumblings floating around for the past year or so that some registrars sell their Who-Is query data to third parties (which again, is not against ICANN terms and conditions), however front running is a pretty new tactic.  In fact, Verisign itself has been accused of allowing domain tasting and front running to go on because it increases the number of domains that eventually get registered.  It’s getting so bad that in Feb 2007 GoDaddy reported that out of 55.1 million domain names that were registered, 51.5 million were refunded at the end of the 5 day grace period.

Now after all that doom and gloom and warnings, how can you protect yourself?  First off, use a registrar who does not sell their Who-Is data to third parties or practice front running.  That may be easier said that done.  If you’re worried about your Who-Is information falling into the wrong hands, go directly to Verisign or CIRA to perform a Who-Is query, or use a program that will allow you to use a command line to make the query, DiG for example.

Just remember that not only are domain names a commodity, they’re increasingly worth a lot of money and there are some unscrupulous people out there who have no second thoughts about buying up something you want in order to sell it back to you for a premium.  When you’re running Who-Is queries, go to a registrar you can trust who won’t front run your domain name or sell their searches to a third party.  If you don’t know if they do or not, just ask.  The registrars who don’t front run will tell you straight away.  If you ask a registrar who either refuses to answer the question or gives you the run around, it’s probably safest to go to a source you can trust to perform your Who-Is lookups.