CivicActions

I do get these occasionally. Worse though is that my mom's business gets all kinds of snail mail spam because of their domain registration, things like "Search Engine Listing Service" and the one that you have pointed out above, and they seem VERY convincing. Messages like "You must renew your domain search engine listing within 30 days"

It looks like this was part of a large mailout in New Zealand. A friend/client here got one from DROA on the same day as I.

These have found me in the UK too - this outfit truly encompasses the "World Wide WebSnail"

I have had domains at DROA (a Canadian company) for years, and at other registrars as well, so did not mind hearing from them about switching. But it's surprising they are writing to people they don't do business with. Probably somebody saw there was money in it (as they offer better prices than many other registrars, and the cost of carrying each new account must be very little if not trivial), and went too far.

The key problem may be that registrars have made a business of selling privacy as well as domains. You buy the domain at the advertised price, and they'll leave your information available for spammers unless you pay them more not to do that.

What's the point of registrars publishing your information at all, if you can just pay them not to publish it?

Also, does anyone know what happens if registrars go out of business? Is there some backup procedure to keep control of your domain?

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John S James
www.smart-accounts.org

They're not very cheap, at least for dot-coms.

A registrar is just an agent for each tld's Network Information Centre. In fact most major dot-com/net/org registrars' buy/manage/update/renew UI is on secure.registerapi.com. The registrar's just customize the appearance for their brand.

So if one registrar goes under, you can just switch to another.

I get these once or twice a year, and have been getting them as long as I've had a .nz domain - hence, almost a decade. I actually get several each time because I own .nz's under several company names (Webfoundry became Apposite, Izeal became Interclue...) as well as my own. They take the addresses out of the domain registry, craft letters that look convincing to an office administrator, and go open slather. They're obviously making a mint because they can afford to not bother removing names from the list that have never "bitten" in almost a decade of getting dead-tree-spammed. But when you consider that the wholesale cost of of a .com or .net is less than US$7 (although the all time champion of gaming the domain system, Verisign, has somehow arranged to get that moved *up* as the cost of providing the root servers continues to plummet on a per-domain basis), and that you get to keep charging them every year, the cost of a bulk mailout is pretty small, when you do the sort of bulk they do.

Essentially, they're aimed at office admin staff and small business owners who own a domain but don't really understand anything about it. You know how they say "there's a sucker born every minute", well consider how many suckers buy themselves a domain name every minute and you'll understand how powerful their business model is.

Of course, this is only one of the many, many things that get gamed in the domain name system. Another one is that registrars will sometimes offer you the opportunity to hide your address from DNS so that outfits like this can't get it, and incidentaly makes it harder for anyone to offer to buy the domain from you, so you're more likely to stay with them, for "only" a few bucks a year. It costs them nothing, of course. Oh, and if your registrar happens to go bankrupt or turn evil, this also makes it just about impossible to prove that you own the domain so that you can get it *out*.

Cheers,
Seth.

--

Seth Wagoner
Geek in Chief
Interclue Ltd

The point of publishing your info is so you can get the domain back (in theory) if you lose the password on it, or your registrar loses *their* records - you need to be able to demonstrate to the top level registrar for your domain that the "John S James" that owns smart-accounts.org is actually *you* and not some other John S James.

Using your registrar's "anonymizer" effectively means that you have to deal with them if you lose your password, because the top level can't help you.

I'm hoping that after the Registerfly debacle, they finally have a process for handling registrars that go bankrupt / turn evil. I haven't been looking lately, but they were definitely aware of the problem after that one...

Personally I think DROA's dead tree spam is evil. They overcharge for what they provide, and they use extremely deceptive sales letters. The going *retail* rate for a .com is less than US$10, and many webhosts throw them in as a freebie or sell them at cost (eg 1&1 does them for US$6.12, or free if you actually host with them). Last I saw DROA was charging something like US$30, but then I just throw their mail in the trash without opening it these days, so I dunno what their current going rate is.

Seth.
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Seth Wagoner
Geek in Chief
Interclue Ltd

AUD 41. http://picasaweb.google.com/b.rudge/DomainRegistryOfAmerica/photo#515333...