01-Aug-2011 14:32
Is your website & domain name safe?
Lots of small UK businesses woke up this weekend to find their websites had gone down in a legal fight between a domain name company and its founder.
Sites using .gb.com addresses went dark on Saturday, after the former boss of the registry, CentralNIC, took control of the whole extension without warning.
It was unclear where emails sent to .gb.com addresses would arrive.
The .gb.com space is sold as an alternative to .co.uk by London-based CentralNIC.
It is not an officially recognised top-level domain, but it has proven to be attractive to a relatively low number of small UK companies which couldn't get the .uk address they wanted.
CentralNIC sells domain names at the third level under about 20 such pseudo-extensions, including .us.com, .ru.com and .uk.com.
But in the case of .gb.com, the domain appears to have been in the nominal control of a third party, CentralNIC's founder Stephen Dyer and his company GB.com Ltd, since at least 2004.
Anyone visiting a .gb.com site yesterday was greeted by a message from GB.com, encouraging the site's owner to sign up for a new account if they wanted DNS service restored.
It is like having a long lease on an office (our business) and another party coming along and erecting a fence around it, demanding money to get back in...
"GB.COM Ltd will not provide a service that you have paid others for, unless they have an arrangement with GB.COM Ltd," the statement said, on a page so amateurish in appearance that some users at first thought it might be a phishing attack.
The sudden switch came completely without warning to all .gb.com domain owners, leaving lots of rather angry and upset owners & contemplating legal action.
According to CEO Ben Crawford, CentralNIC was also caught off-guard. "The other party pulled this tactic with no notice.
There was no indication given that this type of action would occur, and we have absolutely no idea why it did," he said. "We received no advance notice. We established what had happened on Saturday morning, and we have been working non-stop since then to resolve the situation."
Some customers say the firm should have warned them that the domain's ownership was contested and that this weekend's outage was a possibility.
This morning, .gb.com sites appear to be coming back online, after CentralNIC went to extraordinary lengths to help restore DNS service.
Strange as it may seem, this is actually the second time this kind of dispute over an unofficial domain extension has impacted UK businesses.
In 2003, the Colombian owner of uk.co took out over 8,000 websites when it asserted control of the domain, which had been licensed to a British registrar.
(Source: Kevin Murphy - www.theregister. co.uk)
