Domain growth, squatting continues

“Dot Com continues to lead the way by a huge gap at around 85 million .com website names, and this shows that .com remains the most popular domain for website owners. The next best performing domains are .cn, which is China's country top level domain, and Germany's .de domain both at just over 13 million registrations each,” he said.

He added that it was becoming clear that by the end of the first quarter of 2010 it is most likely that the 200-million domain names will be attained, as there were 192 million at the end of 2009.

'Domainers' - fair or foul?

Several driving factors account for the continued, rapid growth in domain name statistics and these are the “domainers” who are in the business of registering and selling attractive domain names - attractive because it's likely somebody else may want to own the domain name in the future for business or other purposes.

“Domainers also go for designing websites under catchy or relevant names, so that they can drive traffic to those sites, and then make money from pay-per-click advertising,” said Mpisane.

The domainers industry is rising strongly because many people realise the potential profits to be made by selling website names, yet such profit-making efforts have not always been done honestly.

“There are still a lot of cases of domainers effectively ‘squatting' on known brand and trademark names. Some have taken advantage of registering wrongly-spelt brand names, so that if users mistype a brand website name, they end up in some other website either claiming to be a legitimate website for the brand looked for or a competitor's brand adverts,” says Mpisane.

South African scenario

“The domainers industry is gaining strength in the West, but it also appears to be slowly gaining momentum in South Africa as well. ZADNA is aware of instances of some ISPs registering brand names that belong to known brand owners.”

Although it has an alternate dispute resolution (ADR) process already in place to resolve disputes over co.za website names, ZADNA admits that more awareness is still necessary, as most businesses seem to be unaware of the ADR process.

Mpisane believes it would be almost impractical job to protect brands up front from registration by squatters. “By its nature, domain name registration is usually automated and as such, there is less human involvement. Practically, there is no person sitting on the other side at co.za checking if the new registrations do not take advantage of brand names. That's why we have the ADR process as a channel that aggrieved people can use to reclaim their brand website names.”

However, the rapid increase in domain name registration is also driven by necessity, as most businesses realise they have to protect their brands across many domains worldwide. According to Mpisane, squatting and the practice of “domaineering” are forcing most businesses to register their brand domain names across the world.

This means, for example, that big South African businesses will not only register .za but also .com as well as in overseas territories such as the UK and China. “If they don't do it this way,” said Mpisane, “they will find sooner or later that somebody else has already registered that brand in that country.”

Various domain operators are putting measures in place to address this problem, in addition to dispute resolution measures already existing.

Licensing regulations

In .za, licensing regulations are expected to come into operation some time in 2010. “These will allow ZADNA to license the entities operating the .za 2nd level domain databases (i.e. registries), such as gov.za and co.za. It will also license the ISPs that want to register or sell .za domain names (better known as ‘registrars'),” he continued.

The advantage of the licensing process is that ZADNA will now be able to set accountability measures for its registries and registrars. For example, an ISP that is found to be hosting domain names and websites used by criminals for e-scams will be required to either suspend such websites or face having its licenses revoked. This will mean loss of business, as such registrars will not be allowed to register .za domain names or to access .za domain name databases anymore,” added Mpisane.

The licensing regulations are in the process of being revised after ZADNA completed the public consultation process in February. Once the regulations pass internal checks and additional comments by stakeholders, they will be submitted to the Minister of Communications for his approval in terms of ECT Act.