What are the domain issues with PPC and proxy registration services?

Monte: Yeah, definitely. And the other point that Ari brought up, which is, you know, it’s kind of a scary issue that I know that a lot of people are gonna be talking about, is this whole thing about the trademark holder’s filing complaints against domain owners, because of PPC landing pages. And as you know, and, you know, we talked about this at length just a little bit earlier, but, you know, most people that use PPC providers, you know, such as DomainSponsor or Google or Overture or the partners like that, even Fabulous, they can’t generally control what shows up on those pay-per-click pages, and I’m starting to hear more from the corporation side that they’re getting kind of pissed that, you know, competitors are showing up, when their brands are being typed in, and so on and so forth.

And it’s--you know, I think that what we need to do is all work together and set some precedents in this area and make sure that we become not liable for such actions, because we’re not the one doing the feeds, you know, those us of that have PPC pages running, that the PPC provider needs to be responsible for that, and hold us harmless. And I think we’re gonna try to make the first attempt to make that work.

Ron: That could certainly develop into one of the stories of 2005, it’d be a good request for a guest for you to bring in Ron Sheridan from DomainSponsor or a Dan Warner from Fabulous, and see what these guys think about that, and maybe what they can do to help avoid a big problem there.

Monte: Yeah, definitely, because I can tell you a lot of corporations are gonna be probably trying and testing the legal area, you know, this in a legal area and spending some money on it, because I’m starting to see more and more ruckus about it, that’s for sure.

Ron: Right. There’s one other piece of news that came out this week that I think is interesting. The--you know, a lot of domain owners use proxy registration services so that their actual contact details don’t show up on the public WhoIs, a lot of times, you know, they’ll do that for legitimate reasons, they don’t want their data harvested and then be this subject of, you know, spam or phone calls, they don’t want that sort of thing, but on the other hand, other people will use it for the wrong reason.

Monte: Right.

Ron: Right.

Monte: And the Department of Commerce decided that they did not want proxy Whois information used for the .us registry. So eNom and a lot of the other registrars are having to notify their clients now that that service is not gonna be available any longer. If you--this is only for .us at this point in time. If you already have the service, you’re okay until it runs out, but as of January of 2006, that’s going to be gone, and .us registry’s going to require that you have accurate WhoIs data on that public record.

And I’m hearing a lot of rumors that that’s just a step in another process, where they’re going to be going through their data base and taking a very close look at whether or not the registrants are meeting the Nexus [ph] requirements for .us. You’ve gotta be a US citizen or have a legitimate business interest here, so I do know there’s a lot of high value names that are owned by entities overseas that may not meet that Nexus requirement, so that’s a story that we may see kind of blowing up here later in the year, also.

Monte: Yeah, that could be a little bit of a rock between a hard place scenario, because, you know, .us is not a preferred secondary extension, you know, they’ve attempted to do things to help boost their registrations, and, you know, in a way, obviously, it’s legitimate if people are hiding behind that screen for illegitimate reasons, or illegal reasons, but many customers, especially with--at our provider, actually have legitimate reasons, you know, for privacy protection.

Ron: Right.

Monte: And don’t want to be spammed and don’t want to be scammed, and we filter all that stuff for them, and, you know, in a way, it’s just gonna make .us a less palatable address than others, and in an era where all these other ancillary extensions, and especially .us, who’s struggling a little bit with some of the newer market share, it’s kind of a challenge, I think.

Ron: Yeah.

Monte: You know, it’s a good and bad thing, I guess, that they have to follow that and that they want to try and enforce accurate WhoIs, but on the other side, when you’re trying to gain a little bit of market share as a country code extension, in a world where dot-com is king, it’s gonna make it a little bit harder.