EURid Sues 400 Registrars For Cyberwarehousing

A press release on EURid’s site confirms the details. EURid has suspended 74K domains and has sued 400 registrars for breach of contract. The move was, according to EURid:

“prompted by abusive behavior from a syndicate of registrars who have systematically acquired domain names with the obvious intent of selling them. In the domain name business this is called warehousing and is not permitted.”

There was a clear and persistent pattern of abusive registration by a syndicate of bogus registrars who were acquiring .eu domains for the purpose of reselling them. In effect this was a cyberwarehousing operation on a massive scale. Among those front companies named in the press release were Ovidio Limited, Fausto Limited and Gabino Limited. EURid stated that the registrars and the registrants were the same - something that had been pointed out to EURid repeatedly over the last few months. This was clearly against the rules:

“Since registrars should only register domain names for existing customers and not “warehouse” the names in order to resell them at a higher price, this is clearly in breach of the registrar contract,” says Herman Sobrie, Legal Manager of EURid.”

Pending a court decision, EURid apparently would like to make these squatted domains available for registration again. However there are still hundreds more bogus registrars that have to be dealt with yet.

Tags: IrishBlogs,.EU, Ovidio Limited, Ovidio, Domains, .eu Fiasco, Internet Statistics, Eurid, Cyberwarehousing, domainnames

Written by John McCormac on July 24th, 2006 with 2 comments.
Read more articles on Domains And Statistics.