Caution Required When Checking Domain Availability
An article in today’s Wall Street Journal reports the allegations that a popular Registrar of .com domain names is monitoring domain names that are searched for availability in that Registrar’s Whois database and then registering those domain names itself before anyone else does. In order to avoid the potential loss of a domain name registration in such a manner, known as “front running”, when checking for availability of potential domain name it is prudent to use the Registry Whois lookups rather than the Registrar Whois lookups. The major Registry Whois lookups are:
- .COM – http://registrar.verisign-grs.com/whois/
- .CA – - http://whois.cira.ca/public
- .ORG – http://www.pir.org/
- .BIZ – http://www.whois.biz/
- .INFO – http://www.afilias.info/cgi-bin/whois.cgi
- .MOBI – http://mtld.mobi/domain/whois
- .CN – http://ewhois.cnnic.net.cn/
- .US – http://www.whois.us/
- .CO.UK – http://www.nominet.org..uk/
A Registry is the authoritative, master database of domain names registered in a top level domain. A Registrar is a company accredited by ICANN through which one can register a domain name. ICANN maintains a list of accredited Registrars.
In a more recent article the Registrar which is the subject of this controversy has indicated that it has changed its practices in this regard.
This entry was posted by Karen Monteith on Tuesday, January 15th, 2008 at 10:06 am and is filed under Domain Name Disputes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.