The following points give further insight into the topics we have covered in this chapter, including internet addresses where you can find out more about domain names and related topics:
- One example that springs to mind was a Canadian bitcoin exchange where the CEO used a purely fictitious name in the WHOIS record because both the exchange and himself personally were constantly under various forms of attack. The problem manifested through a unique combination of unfortunate events (don't they always?). The company lost access to their registrar account at roughly the same time that a hostile third party was attempting to hijack the same account, causing the then-registrar to put the account into "lockdown." The exchange had no means to prove its legitimate claim to a domain name that was, at the time, handling millions of dollars in bitcoin exchange volumes and was registered to a nonexistent person. They operated for over a year in a state of limbo, having no access to the account controlling their prime domain name and in constant dread that some third party would successfully hijack it at any moment.
- ICANN maintains a complete list of EPP status codes and meanings at https://www.icann.org/epp.
- Some sections of this book were hard to write because I feared veering off into "infomercial" territory. There is a service that exists solely to monitor various aspects of your domain names, including expiry dates and those windows when your registrar's interests are opposed to yours. It's called https://domainsure.com. But here's the thing - we created it. Sorry if that's self-promotion, but it's the only service of its kind that exists at the time of writing.
- This applies mainly to gTLD and new TLD domains. Many ccTLD registries tightly control the expiry process and this is not possible. For example, CIRA runs the "To Be Released" (TBR) process and .CA registrars cannot "direct transfer" .CA domains or otherwise auction expiring names.
- Even my company operates web.to as a pseudo-TLD for "Toronto," but it's really the ccTLD for the Kingdom of Tonga.
- .aero, .biz, .coop, .info, .museum, .name, and .pro in 2000 and then .asia, .cat, .jobs, .mobi, .post, .tel, and .xxx in 2004.
- See Victor Mayer's Danger + Opportunity != Crisis (http://pinyin.info/chinese/crisis.html).
- I added this section after a high-school friend from my hometown contacted me asking for advice on getting his business's domain name back up and running. It turned out he had paid for his domain renewal to his Canada-based reseller, who had gone bankrupt years earlier. The defunct reseller still had a server online somewhere which was on autopilot, sending out renewal invoices which would never be actioned when somebody actually paid them. The registrar was in India and took 24 hours or more to respond to email support requests, to which they initially replied, "Please speak to your reseller." They never did rectify the situation and we ended up transferring his domain over to our system, which took another seven days under that TLD. All told, his business website was down for over two weeks.
- NameCheap was sued by a Dutch company for alleged "cybersquatting" because their offending domains were using their WhoisGuard service - see http://www.domainnamenews.com/featured/namecheap-sued-domain-whois-privacy-service/5198.
- For a long period of time easyDNS refused to offer WHOIS privacy for these reasons, but people really seemed to want it, so we did an "official flip-flop" and started offering it.
- We submitted public comments recommending against changing the current policy until WHOIS could be redesigned from the ground up.
- Via Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_name).