Te Kete o Karaitiana Taiuru (Blog)

Domain name registration oversights

According to this article Slingshot let a business critical domain name expire causing phone issues for their iTalk service.
 
How on earth did a large and respectful company such as SlingShot miss a renewal on a domain name which resulted in critical business services being lost?.  A former staff member registered the domain name using his own email address.
This high profile case brings the issue into public attention and hopefully makes every domain name holder re evaluate thier domain name registrations. Anyone who has a domain name can easily fall foul of the tight .nz plocy. More often than not by an oversigght as opposed to any malicious intent.
Key facts:
1. For about $100 anyone can set up as a domain name reseller in .nz and all the major domains. More often than not these resellers dissapear as quickly as they appeared.
2. Often web designer companies put thier own details in the domain name ownership so they can bill thier clients and make a profit. While this is technially against the .nz policy there are companies who sucessfully get around this and do.
3. Often organisations use the email address of the current IT person, web designer, consultant or as in the case of Slingshot, the staff member inputed thier email directly into the form as opposed to a more generic email e.g. dns@company.co.nz .
Considering it is a common practice for large organsiations to employ domain name specialists who ensure the many issues of organisation branding of domain names does are protected, i am especially suprised that a national Internet company needed a mistake to iccur in the mission critical service before it noticed anything wrong.

I could just imagine the mammoth issues if someone registered the expired domain before Slingshot re registered it. Effectively there would be a delay during the disputes process which has a cost associated with it. It would have possibly been cheaper to pay the new owner $5,000 for a qucik solution..
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DISCLAIMER: This post is the personal opinion of Dr Karaitiana Taiuru and is not reflective of the opinions of any organisation that Dr Karaitiana Taiuru is a member of or associates with, unless explicitly stated otherwise.

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