One Company Registers One Million Alternate Domain Names

from the well,-if-it's-free... dept

Someone who prefers to remain anonymous sent in a link to a story that is not that clearly written, so it's a little difficult to understand what's happening. It appears that Afilias, a domain registrar who manages the .info TLD, offered some sort of promotion to other registrars, though no one will say specifically what that promotion was. However, it looks like they probably offered free registration of .info domain names for a limited period of time. In response, it appears a company named Sipence, who may also be the same as eNom, proceeded to register 950,000 .info domain names for themselves in the course of a single week. They came up with the 950,000 .info domain names by looking at the .com domain names their customers already owned and registering the .info equivalents. Now people are saying that eNom plans to charge their current customers a small fee if they want to use these .info domains "registered on their behalf." Some, however, are claiming that eNom basically is acting like a cybersquatter, specifically buying up domain names they know their customers may value (probably for free, or close to free) and then offering them to their customers for a fee. If Afilias was trying to increase registrations of .info domain names, they have succeeded. Apparently, only 1.5 million total .info domain names were registered in the first three years of its existence, so adding another million in a single week is quite a significant sum.

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