Dragonfly Media Curacao

A domain name is a technical construct, but it is also an administrative entity. When someone registers a domain name he/she has to register the owner and the contacts associated with the name. These contacts are the administrative contact, the billing contact and the technical contact.

When you want to have (created) a website for your company you will need a domain name. You can register the domain name yourself or you can let the company that builds your website register it for you. When you register the domain name yourself, there’s usually no problem, but problems can arise when you let someone else register your domain name.

The following situation is an oft recurring one. A company hires a webdesign company to build its website, the webdesign company registers the domain name that the client want to have and arranges for hosting of the website. In this case the webdesign company ties everything together and makes sure that you have a website which the client can use to sell its product. If everything goes well and all parties recognize their responsibilities nothing untoward will happen and everyone is happy.

The problems can start when the client is no longer happy with the service of the webdesign company and wants to change service providers. Because the client trusted the webdesigners and does not know anything about the details of the internet, the webdesign company has the power to hijack the domain name and, in effect, the website of its client. This is a situation that nobody wants but, regrettably, happens all too often.

All this can be avoided when the client makes sure from the beginning that he/she owns the domain name and has the power to change settings for the name without needing the webdesign company to do it. The webdesign company will need to be set up as the technical contact and, if they take care of annual payments for the website, the billing contact, but the client should be the administrative contact and the owner. Furthermore; the client has to be in possession of the username and password so he/she can change the aforementioned settings.

Finding out who owns your domain
You can find out many details about the ownership and technical settings of a domain name by visiting the website www.whois.net or www.allwhois.com. When you do a so-called WHOIS lookup for your domain name you will be able to see all this information in the WHOIS record for the domain name.

The WHOIS record lists the following data:

• The registrant – this is the registered owner of the domain name
• The registrar – this is the company with which the domain name is registered
• The administrative contact
• The Technical contact
• The domain (name)servers – the servers that point all requests for your domain name in the right direction

The name of the client should be registered as the registrant. If you see someone else’s name here, it would be wise to change this.

This works for .com, .net and .org domains (which are the most used domain extensions). If you want to find out these details for another country’s extension you will need to visit the domain registry for that extension. For .nl domain names for instance, this is www.sidn.nl. When you want to find out the details for a domain name whose details are not disclosed through the internet (for instance: .an for the Netherlands Antilles) you will need to call the institution that takes care of the registration of those domain names. Luckily there are currently not many countries left that don’t disclose WHOIS details through the internet.

What to do when you do not own your domain
If you have done the above and found out that you do not own your domain name it is important to make sure that you do. To do this you will need to confront the people who are registered as the domain name owner.

What you will need is an acknowledgement from these people that you own the domain name, the username and password that allow you to change the WHOIS record and, with the previous, to change the ownership information at the registrar. If the webdesign company knows anything about the legal implications of not complying with this demand they will relinquish the information without a problem and there will not be any problem.

It could happen though that the people that are registered as the domain name owner do not want to relinquish control over the domain name. This is, of course, a good indication that they are out to hijack the domain name should something occur.

There have been many legal battles about this subject when the internet was young, but most of these have been won by the, in this case, client. What is important for the client to have is the contract or quote provided by the webdesign company when they first registered your domain name, all pieces of communication that you can find where you ask the webdesign company to register the domain name and their invoices for renewing the domain name registration.

If you do not have all this information because it was so long ago that your domain name was registered or for whatever other reason, you could still have a case. Usually a domain name is comprised of the name of the company of the client. Why would a webdesign company register a domain name with another company’s name for any other reason than trying to sell it to the company or to hijack it? So, if the domain name yourcompany.com has as its registered owner the webdesign company it can be clear to any judge that the webdesign company registered the domain name on behalf of its client and therefore belongs to the client.

All in all; all companies that want to have a website designed should be aware of this information to safeguard a marketing tool that has become the number one generator of business for many companies. If you lose control over it, the consequences for your business could be dire. Luckily, 99.9% of the webdesign companies and hosting companies are also aware of this and will inform you and safeguard you, but there’s always the 0.1% that ruins it.

Related links:
www.whois.net
www.allwhois.com
www.sidn.nl

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This entry was posted on Friday, February 9th, 2007 at 8:59 am and is filed under Domain names. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.