It's Official: Registrars Cannot Hold Domains Hostage Without a Court Order 112
Stunt Pope writes "Back when the City of London Police issued those 'takedown requests' to domain registrars, most complied. However, as previously reported here, easyDNS didn't. A bunch of the taken-down domains wanted to move to easyDNS. One problem: their registrar wouldn't let them. It took awhile, but easyDNS fought it. They've finally gotten a ruling (PDF) under the ICANN policy that ordered the hostage domains transferred."
hmm.... (Score:4, Interesting)
how about like when whole domains are being used for malware, phishing, or fraud?
do we have to go thru a court to get a registrar to do something? that isn't reallllly that good of news.
namesearchhere.com is being used for botnet clickfraud. along with probably hundreds of others... now the registrar can just sit on their hands and say... welp. nothing i can do but charge fees. my hands are tied!
registrars are making money of DGA, clickfraud, and all manner of shitty activities. now they can really drag their feet.
Re:Thanks EasyDNS. (Score:5, Interesting)
EasyDNS is a great registrar. Some years ago I had an issue with one of my domain names because a law firm in North Carolina registered a very similar name. The only difference was that they inserted a hyphen in their name and I didn't have one. Naturally some of their clients omitted the hyphen in the address and I received the emails instead, which I passed on to them.
That was a mistake. The law company was very angry at me, and they accused me of intercepting their mail, using my domain in bad faith, etc. They ignored the fact that my domain name was registered over 5 years before they registered their name. They attempted to get EasyDNS to lock my domain and transfer it to them. They attempted to harass both me and EasyDNS. Eventually they attempted to take my domain through ICANN name dispute resolution proceedings, which failed. They even attempted to get the FBI involved, which resulted in an interesting interview with two agents, but nothing else.
EasyDNS was wonderful. They investigated and they decided there was no reason to interrupt my domain service. They supported me through the resolution proceedings. I would not use any other domain registrar for any domain name I really care about.
EasyDNS isn't the least expensive registrar, but they aren't the most expensive either. The fact they in Canada (and therefore outside USA jurisdiction) is an added bonus.
City of London = Privately owned Corporation (Score:4, Interesting)
the City of London is a privately owned corporation. I would imagine their police are also.
Do not mistake London the city with the City of London.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/oct/31/corporation-london-city-medieval [theguardian.com]
Re:Godaddy (Score:2, Interesting)
I also had GoDaddy hold my domain hostage, it was for a web security site, mostly used to find security holes in OSS as a hobby. Someone reported my site to GoDaddy and said it was a "hacking website" so I had to pay GoDaddys "penalty fee" to get control of my domain again so I could transfer it to someone else. I read through all their ToS and there was nothing about this "penalty fee" anywhere, which I pointed out to them, they replied with something along the lines of tough shit (they used nicer language but does that really matter). So I paid their "fee" to "unlock" my domain and I tried to transfer it to another registrar, I couldn't, everything in the control panel was set to allow me to transfer, I checked with GoDaddy support they said nothing was stopping me from transferring so I checked with the Registrar I was transferring to and they said everything on their end was working and had to be something with GoDaddy.. So.. I contacted GoDaddy support again, they still claimed nothing was stopping me from transferring the domain.. I tried to transfer to a different registrar than the first and same thing it still wouldn't transfer.. the support of this registrar informed me that like the first GoDaddy wasn't allowing the transfer.. so... back to GoDadddy support, they still claim I should be able to transfer even though I provided them with evidence that I tried two different registrars at my expense with the same problem and the only common denominator was GoDaddy.. at this point I started to act like a flat out asshole and after being transferred around they finally admitted that oh turns out they were the reason for the vein popping out of my head and the reason why I couldn't transfer the domain and that they made a change and I should be able to transfer the domain in 48 hours and if not "to contact support" again, because that worked out so well in the first place.. so long story short my domain is not with GoDaddy anymore and I would not recommend anyone to use them.
National Association of Boards of Pharmacy (Score:5, Interesting)