When Domain Names Expire

A filtering company says that a high rate of domain name turnover means that today's portal could become tomorrow's pornography site.

by Michael Singer of siliconvalley.internet.com [November 4, 2002]

When a Spanish porn producer made an unsolicited bid to buy file-swapping service Napster for the purpose of transforming it into a porn site, it raised a few eyebrows.

But online filtering service provider Websense says a high rate of website domain name turnover creates legal risks for companies, meaning that today's information technology site could become tomorrow's pornography site.

According to the San Diego-based research firm, more than 1,500 websites that six months ago were shopping bazaars, news portals and travel-related are now porn sites. In addition, during the same period, more than 3,000 websites that featured pornography now offer mainstream content.

One domain that reversed the trend was the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which won a lawsuit last month against the operator of UNCGirls.com. The ownership was transferred back to the university, bringing an end to the site's use as a provider of explicit sexual materials.

"Our research has shown that expired domain names change ownership daily and can often be recreated as porn sites," said Websense CTO Harold Kester. "It's critical then for companies to use an EIM (employee information management) product that reviews websites frequently to verify categorization of websites over time."

One of the most notorious examples of domain name claim jumping is the landmark $65 million lawsuit over the sex.com domain. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit in San Francisco recently upheld the court's previous ruling in the five-year battle over one of the most valuable addresses on the Web.

Despite these examples, Kester says many EIM vendors fail to recognize the magnitude of the problem, either not revisiting already-categorized sites or refusing to conduct regular DNS aging on sites as they come on- and off-line.

Scott Clark, the executive editor of internet.com's Web Developer Channel, says since each registrar's expiration policies are different, you must approach the problem of expiring domains in several ways. You can:

• try to view your domains' whois records at least once a month to verify their accuracy, contact information, etc.
• make sure your domain contacts' email addresses are valid and working
• encourage your clients to register their domains for five or more years, so the maintenance fee won't come up each year
• use a reminder service to let you know when your domains are about to expire such as 101-Reminders or SmartReminders.com

"One last thing you can do is to register (or transfer) all of your domains to one registrar—preferably one with a publicly stated expiration policy as well as a domain management system which allows you to keep track of your domains and their expiration dates," said Clark.

Internet.com also hosts a site, UnclaimedDomains.com, which sends subscribers a weekly list of recently dropped domain names.

Finding websites is one part of the solution. But keeping up with website categorization is something that could keep companies out of the courtroom, according to Jennifer Kearns, a labor and employment partner at the law firm of Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison.

"Website domain name changes can create a major legal liability risk for companies if their EIM software fails to pay attention to the constant change of the Web," said Kearns. "For example, companies may allow employees to visit business or entertainment websites, only to inadvertently let pornography websites enter the workplace—creating the possibility for sexual harassment or hostile workplace lawsuits."

While innocent sites becoming pornography portals remains a key problem, website domain name changes can also create IT management frustration when they change from pornography to mainstream in nature. Employees who need to get to mainstream sites for research or work-related activities are accidentally blocked, leading to an increase in employee complaints and help desk calls.

In some cases, preventing pornographers from sharking expired domain names even requires government intervention.

The most egregious example is John Zuccarini, who registered 5,500 copycat domain names, many of them aimed at children. The FTC shut his operation down.

The FTC said Zuccarini registered 15 variations of "The Cartoon Network" and 41 variations on the name of pop singer Britney Spears. Nearly any misspelling of the above names would send a child to Zuccarini's website where countless browser windows would open offering gambling and pornography.

Other sites registered by Zuccarini include variations on "Harry Potter" and tennis star Anna Kournikova, as well as a host of names featuring the word "cupcake."

Websense said it has a software package that processes dead links with a system, re-fingerprints a website, and compares it to an original fingerprint of the site. If there is sufficient "difference" between the fingerprints, the site is reviewed by a human Web analyst for database re-classification.

— End