ICANN Transfer Policy Issues
Monte: So I know there’s a lot of issues going on in the domain industry these days, and I know that you have a couple things that you’d like to talk about and have on your mind. What are some of the both positive and negative things that are going on, and what should domainers be on the lookout and what do they need to do to protect themselves with the resent ICANN transfer policies? Obviously, it’s proven that this is only increasing hijacking and domain theft and loss. And, of course, we have taken extreme measures to protect our corporate assets and our customer’s corporate assets with some of the security measures that we have in place, but what’s some of the experiences that you’ve seen out there and some of the discussion that we can talk about with the people listening?
Richard: Certainly. I think the--ICANN was really trying to solve a consumer relation issue, in that a lot of registrars were not allowing transfer requests to go through, when one of their clients wanted to transfer from one registrar to another. So ICANN had the right intention in terms of trying to solve this consumer relation issue for intra-registrar transfers, but what they have created is a domain hijacker’s paradise.
Monte: Yeah, no kidding.
Richard: So if you’ve got a registrar that you can trick into saying--you know, processing your transfer order on a domain name that is not under registrar law, you know, that--the domain name will just go, if the domain name owner isn’t paying attention or, you know, if they’re away on vacation for five days or if they’re e-mail box is being spammed or if their e-mail address is, you know, god forbid not working for five days or not being checked.
Monte: Right.
Richard: So the gaining registrar has a economic incentive to accept transfer orders, and so when they receive a faxed order in saying, “Hey, this is my proof of ID, and, you know, I am the officer of the company,” they’re going to do a cursory look over and saying, you know, that looks great, let’s except his credit card, which probably is stolen and process this order for $14.95 and let’s do this transfer request. And, you know, the fact that the domain name is, you know, the whois is current and, you know, do they send an e-mail--you know, does the gaining registrar send an e-mail to the who is that’s listed and say, you know, are you aware that this order’s come in by fax? You know, there’s a lot of checks and balances that aren’t happening.
Monte: Right, exactly.
Richard: And it’s created a lot of hijackings. I would say it’s created more hijackings then were going on in the past.
Monte: Yeah. We’ve actually--just some stats here, since the new policy’s been in place, we’ve thwarted and prevented about 143 fraudulent transfers being taken away from our customers.
Richard: Right.
Monte: Even though the names are unlocked and, you know, ICANN has this, of course, policy that the name’s unlocked, you have the authority, and I’ve had to defend this thing on behalf of our customers several times.
Richard: Right.
Monte: And on the other hand, we’ve had names come in to Moniker that were on old lists that people used to own, you know, large domainers that forgot they sold the domain name or whatever, and because it was unlocked on the other side, on the losing registrar, they’ve come over.
Richard: Right.
Monte: And so it just tells you how open the system is now, and the reasons why we have our security measures in place, so that that never happens with our customers.
Richard: Right. I mean, I have seen domain names that were UDRP’d and they were transferred over from the registrant to the trademark owner and now they’re back, because, you know, that registrant processed the list at a registrar and still had their old URDP domain listed there.
Monte: Right.
Richard: And the, you know, the trademark owner never locked it, so it came back.
Monte: Right, right.
Richard: And, you know, that’s going to reflect badly on the registrants, but also on the registrar, and just on the whole system in general.
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