Dot Info adds a million names in less than a week!
Recent registration numbers for Dot Info are huge. But most of the names seem to be coming from the same registrar: eNom. How are they doing it?
Last month, Dot Info registry Afilias launched a special promotion. Participating registrars get free Dot Info names for four months (the promotions ends December 31th). There is a 25 name limit per registrant, which it's up to the registrar to enforce, and the promotion is only valid on new one-year registrations.
Stratospheric volumes
Since the start of the promotion, we've been monitoring Dot Info's registration volumes. Early last week, the numbers were looking good. Dot Info gained around 36,000 names last Tuesday, more than Dot Com for that day. Impressive as beating the Internet's star domain may be, there was a lot better to come for Dot Info.
Towards the end of last week, we noticed volumes suddenly start to go stratospheric. More than 300,000 names in a single day before the week was out and then, during the weekend, in excess of 600,000 names! By our count, Dot Info has now added close to a million new names. That's an almost 100% increase since our last count .
Surprised as we were by these numbers, we were even more taken aback to find that eNom seem to be doing the bulk of the registrations. The mystery deepened when we checked the company's website and could not find any apparent mention of the Dot Info promotion...
Whois discrepancy
At the same time, we were contacted by a couple of Dot Com owners. They told us that their names had been registered as Dot Infos by eNom. They had never requested eNom to carry out the registrations and eNom had not yet contacted them to let them know the names were registered. Furthermore, it seemed that eNom had simply copied the Dot Com Whois data to register the Dot Info version.
A Whois check on one of the domains (the owner has asked us not to reveal the name) with the registry shows the creation date of the domain as September 28th 2004. But the same check on the same name using eNom's Whois server shows the creation date as October 28th 2003!
A strange discrepancy between the two Whois databases which seems hard to explain until a check is done on the Dot Com version of the name. That shows the domain's creation date as October 28th 2003 and leads us to believe that the Dot Info domain was created by simply duplicating the Dot Com Whois, including creation and expiry dates!
Channel programs
We've asked both Afilias and eNom to explain these findings. Afilias International Affairs adviser Desiree Miloshevic confirmed the huge registration volumes and that some registrars might be running special "channel programs" to take advantage of the Dot Info promotion. But she indicated that she was not aware of any specific action eNom might be undertaking. "You'll have to ask them," she told us by phone this morning.
eNom have yet to answer our email sent on Saturday. We'll keep you posted as soon as they do…
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