/Opinion/ Domain names
17/12/2008 | Filed under Discover > Opinion
Your domain name is a valuable property. Keep track of renewals and don’t let cybersquatters steal it, urges Nominet’s Emily Taylor
Ecommerce maturity, and the increasing comfort levels of businesses and consumers transacting online, has delivered a significant increase in the value of online brands. This has created a currency – the domain name, a gateway to an organisation’s brand – that’s fiercely traded.
According to Nominet’s 2007 Domain Name Industry Report, the global domain market has seen increasing growth rates over the last five years, with the total number of domain names now growing at a rate in excess of 30 per cent per annum compared to 10 per cent in 2002. There’s an active market in buying, selling and storing domain names, with regular sales exceeding £100,000 and peak values reaching more than £1million.
Based on current renewals trends revealed in the report, in the next two years alone, over 140,000 .co.uk domains will be re-registered in less than 10 seconds after they become available. This highlights the need for businesses and individuals to prioritise renewing their registrations. Failure to do so can result in your online brand identity being snapped up by someone else.
Our report showed that 70 per cent of owners renew their domain names and a large proportion do so well ahead of time, either a month (25 per cent), or a day (14 per cent) before they’re due to expire. However, 14 per cent of businesses don’t renew their domain name until the day after renewal is due. Of those who didn’t renew, just under four per cent of registrants simply forgot. And this can be a costly mistake.
Renewing a .uk domain name is relatively easy and it’s possible to do so up to six months before its expiry date. However, if the contact information associated with the domain name is out of date, your may not receive any renewal reminders from Nominet or your registrar.
Online disputes
Cybersquatting is a significant problem for companies with well-known, established brands. It involves registering, trafficking in or using a domain name with the explicit intent to profit from a brand owner’s goodwill or trademark, by offering to sell the domain name to the brand owner at an inflated price or making money from internet traffic accidentally landing on their page.
There have been developments over the last 10 years in the type of cybersquatting activity that occurs. For example, profitable results can be yielded from typosquatting. This is when a user makes typographical errors when inputting a website address into a web browser. Websites that are common misspellings of popular sites can contain pay-per-click ads from which the typosquatter will benefit each time a user clicks.
The result is that organisations (and individuals) are faced with a choice: protect the brand at potentially significant cost or accept the infringement. While the UK is one of the more expensive countries in which to pursue litigation, the spectre of the time and money involved in protection means that small businesses are effectively disenfranchised from the court system.
Dispute resolution services are a viable alternative. Businesses can use these services as a cost-effective, efficient method of dealing with domain name disputes. There are various online dispute resolution policies available to UK businesses, including Nominet’s Dispute Resolution Service (DRS) for .uk domain names and the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) for .com, .net and others.
These offer a quick alternative to the costly court process. For example, Nominet’s procedure is founded on mediation and, if needed, an expert decision regarding the dispute. Nominet’s team of mediators currently handles an estimated 13 per cent of all commercial mediations in the UK. In addition, we’ve pioneered telephone mediation to settle disputes about .uk domain names. Where time zones or party preferences require it, our team can also mediate electronically (by email).
The success of mediation for online dispute resolution means it’s possible for individuals and businesses to protect themselves from potential cyber threats cost-effectively. In addition, the lessons we’ve learned by administering the DRS are now being used in alternative dispute resolution services throughout our organisation and in providing advice to others worldwide. Our challenge is to ensure that resolution services adapt to a rapidly changing online environment.
Emily Taylor is director of Legal and Policy for Nominet
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Comments
John / 21/12/2008 / 17:56 / http://www.furniturestoreblog.com
Here in the U.S. litigation is also quite costly to pursue and often out of reach of the begging web entrepreneur.
Manuel / 24/01/2009 / 05:56 / http://www.motorlogy.com
I can recommend to host your domain with Godaddy. They will make it hard to forget renewing your domain, they send you a couple of email notifications. And even if the domain expired they will keep it for an extra week, to make it harder for domain thiefs.
David / 08/06/2009 / 12:24 / http://www.fishnet.co.uk
The value of a good domain name still isn't appreciated by the majority of businesses and individuals. Recently, a client of ours wound down their company due to a relocation abroad - and instructed us to let their 11 year old, three letter generic dictionary word .co.uk expire!
Even in the current economic climate, this is likely to be worth in the region of £10,000+. Needless to say, we recommended they hang onto the domain name, and let us broker a sale for it.
Jon / 08/07/2009 / 17:11 / http://www.ableaf.com
We found that our hosting company did notify us our domain name was due to expire but the credit card info held was out of date. Unfortunately we couldn't change the card details in advance as strangely their systems only let you update them when they find the payment fails.
This of course happened and once we were notified of the payment failure it didn't leave much time to re-register a new credit card. Luckily we managed to pay for it with a day in hand but that was too close for comfort.
It makes you realise how we rely on hosting companies to safeguard our domain names, telling us when something needs to be done or potentially lose the site! We will certainly be more careful who we get our hosting with in the future.
