Domain Listing and Ownership
Posted: May 27, 2009 » by Lead Architect » in Domains
Did someone purchase or setup a domain for you? If so, have you checked to see who’s listed as your Registrant and Administrative Contact? You should! There are very few ways to protect your precious domain and making sure you are the Registrant and Administrative Contact in the domain’s listing is one of them.
The Registrant and Administrative Contact are the legal owners of the domain. It is important that this be your name (not your web developers name) in case you need to move your domain to another management company or defend it in a trademark infringement circumstance.
Types of Domain Listing Contacts
1. Registrant – the licensee of the domain name, the individual or company who has the right to use, sell or destroy a domain name. This should be your company name.
2. Administrative Contact – the appointed agent for all management functions. This needs to be an employee, director, or manager of your company.
3. Technical and Billing Contacts – these contacts are much less important and can either be within your company or the vendors assisting you.
Netdrafter always uses the customer as the Administrative Contact for domains we manage. Check up on your domain listing with our free Domain Listing Whois Lookup tool. You can also use this tool to search for additional available domain names or see who owns a domain you’re interested in. This tool, called Whois (pronounced “who is”; not an acronym) is a protocol for finding information about Internet servers and domains. Since this is a publicly available tool, we recommend using your business address for the listing rather than your home address. Home based business? Be safe and get a cheap PO Box address to associate with your business.
It is also legally important that your listing information be accurate and kept up to date. Did you know that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) requires you to update your domain name listing annually? Netdrafter updates the domains we manage automatically. If you’ve gone through another company however, you’ll need to contact them to get your listing updated.
On the subject of ICANN and trademark infringement, possession of a valid trademark is only one of three requirements that you need to meet to win ownership of a domain name. For more information on this topic, read ICANN’s Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy.
An effective way to protect your domain from mistakenly being sold or transferred to a competitor is to turn on a feature called “registrar or domain lock.” We lock all domains we manage by default. The lock prevents transfer to another registrar. If in the event a customer needs to change registrars, we unlock the domain for that purpose. We suggest that the new registrar turns the lock back on after transfer.
Have questions about domain ownership? Contact us and we’ll can point you in the right direction.
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