Review of the Year: Domain name sellers

Frustration with the lack of regulation in the domain name selling industry finally reached boiling point in 2002.

After suffering at the hands of a number of resellers trying to scare them into paying over the odds for domain names they probably will never need, companies started to fight back.

Many resorted to reporting companies to Trading Standards. Others contacted vnunet.com, which received more than 100 emails from companies complaining about the selling tactics of some domain name sellers.

Many of these complaints were passed to the Office of Fair Trading, which then started looking into them.

November also saw Nominet, the .uk domain name registry, finally take a stand.

It took two companies, Domain Registrar Services and UK-Names (which runs the uk-names.biz web site and is not related to any similarly named companies), to court to stop them from using its name in their sales pitches. Nominet won an interim injunction against the two firms.

But the problems still exist. vnunet.com continued to receive complaints about controversial selling tactics, usually involving domain name resellers trying to panic firms into registering domain names to save them from a 'mystery shopper'.

And, because the industry is unregulated and almost anyone can set up as a reseller, when smaller resellers go bust, which they do at a rate of around 20 per month, their customers are left with a nightmare of red tape to unravel while they try to move to a new host.

All these problems only harm the reputable resellers, but many seem unwilling to club together to stamp out these tactics.

The problems will continue until some kind of independent body, such as exists for the building and travel industries, is set up to regulate domain name selling.