Registrar accused over dot-eu stash

NEWS

A registrar and reseller of dot-eu domain names has denied accusations his business has operated unfairly by stockpiling more than a thousand three-letter domain names and charging customers more than £1,000 to buy each one.

Stephen Wilde, of Hampshire-based company Really Useful Domains, told silicon.com sister site ZDNet UK it's an "idealistic approach" to suggest stockpiling is unethical.

The accusation came from Andrew Hooper, a new father who recently wanted to take advantage of the new dot-eu top-level domain (TLD) to give his two-week-old son Christopher James a "domain that he can use during his life".

Hooper was dismayed to find that cjh.eu was one of hundreds of domains that had been bought up by Really Useful Domains, which specialises in acquiring three-letter domain names and reselling them at a minimum of €1,500 each.

Registrars of dot-eu names are unable to register names for themselves and then sell them on - a practice known as warehousing - as this would be a breach of their contracts with EURid, the organisation set up to administer the TLD. Last month, EURid launched a lawsuit against 400 American registrars it accused of warehousing.

However, as Wilde and his company registered all the names through a Canadian third party, no rules have been broken.

Nonetheless, Hooper maintained registrars had the market "sewn up". Speaking on Wednesday, he said: "You have to go through a registrar and they're monopolising the market. EURid has… allowed anyone who puts down a €10,000 deposit to have a share of this monopoly.

"There are no decent investigations into these companies - they don't seem to be enforcing the spirit of the law, let alone the letter of it."

But Wilde argued registrars had only "really had an advantage over the public" during the initial land-rush for dot-eu domain names, which took place earlier this year. "Now it makes no difference at all whether you're a registrar or not," he said.

He insisted Really Useful Domains had not even been an accredited registrar during the land-rush, and played down the suggestion people should not be able to stockpile names for resale at inflated prices.

He said: "I think it's a very idealistic approach and, if you could guarantee every human on the planet would adhere to that, it would be fine but it's not. I'm afraid if they didn't put enough rules in to enforce it, you only need one person in the globe to... not adhere to that and we'd all wring our hands."

A EURid representative said on Wednesday: "It should be possible for anyone to register domain names and as many as they like. If they find someone to pass the domain name to there's nothing we can do."

He added: "We're not particularly fond of this but it is allowed."

In the lawsuit filed against hundreds of US registrars, EURid accused them of conspiring to set up three front companies in the UK and then registering tens of thousands of dot-eu domains in those companies' names, thus attempting to bypass EURid's rules on registrars stockpiling names for their own benefit.

That case and other complaints over allocations during the land-rush phase led a British Member of the European parliament, Diana Wallis, to file a parliamentary question on the subject for the European Commission. A response is due later this month.

A spokesperson for the EC said, as EURid is "an independent agency", the Commission "does not have any supervisory role".

Although the EC was unable to comment on Wallis' question prior to the official answer being given, he added there is a "set of rules under which EURid has to operate and we have to ensure this framework is observed".

David Meyer writes for ZDNet UK