Public Comment: CRAI Report on gTLD Registries and Registrars
One thing has always concerned me as an individual owning a very small number of domains, mainly on behalf of not-for-profits. That is that by monitoring peoples' searches for free domain names the companies involved can beat the user to it and try to sell the chosen name at some premium. While registration involves multiple disconnected companies, this is difficult to do without it being provable. When the same company can perform more than one function, short term domain squatting becomes possible to do easily and without leaving a provable trace to the outside. The threat of removal of any company found to be perpetrating this or some other fraud cannot be easily carried out without threatening the smooth continuation of the DNS. I'm not sure if this happened to me in the early days when I dithered as to whether to buy a domain or not. When I decided to do so the three letter domain I had searched for had been taken and was for sale (and still is many years later). The three letters are obscure, and similar ones are still unregistered, making me wonder if my searching triggered the squat on that particular name. David -- David Ledger - Freelance Unix Sysadmin in the UK. HP-UX specialist of hpUG technical user group (www.hpug.org.uk) david.ledger@xxxxxxxxxxx www.ivdcs.co.uk |