Earlier this week, I was following a story lead about an interesting political domain registration. Likely because of the nature of the domain name, the .com version was registered under privacy since it was created, so the actual owner of the domain name wasn’t known. When a newly registered domain name is registered privately, it can be tough to learn the owner.
One interesting thing I noticed was that the primary domain extensions were all registered at the same time. The .com, .net, .org, .biz, .info, and .us domain names were all purchased at the same domain registrar, which likely indicated that they were all bought by the same entity.
All of the domain names were registered privately, with the exception of one – the .US domain name. According to a news bulletin from the International Trademark Association, privacy or proxy registrations are not permitted on .US domain names. This means that whoever registered the group of names privately was unable to use privacy on the .US domain name registration.
As a result of this, I was able to see who bought the domain name, and it makes sense based on what I previously learned about the set of domain names. Based on what I learned, it’s probably not much of a story, but I’ll keep monitoring things and perhaps will break something this week or next.
The next time you want to find out the owner of a set of domain names that are almost certainly registered to the same entity, check out the .US domain registration.
I love political domaining! I especially loved beating President Obama on a UDRP regarding OrganizingForAction(dot)net. I look forward to being audited by the IRS and having my Healthcare coverage denied due to my victory.
I have several political domains myself, sold a few to some interesting people.. As for .US, I always liked this TLD UNTIL they regulated it.
Raider, what do you mean “[until] they regulated it”? What have they done that they were not doing before?
Did the NTIA not implement the restriction against private registrations long after .US was released?
To the best of my knowledge it was in place from the beginning.
Some people may have gotten away with a little cheating, however, though perhaps short lived.
Looking at the .us is a great way to find out who registered matching domains in other TLDs.
There’s one exception, and that’s that big companies have found a way to skirt the restrictions. They use MarkMonitor’s DNStinations to register the domains on their behalf.
It’s really just whois privacy, yet they get away with it.