Domain Name Registration and Ownership
May 17th, 2012Over the last 20 years or so, the Internet has grown and evolved to become an essential part of our lives. Increasingly, more and more people are migrating from simply using the Internet for looking at websites and using email to actively participating in hosting web blogs, community websites, and small business websites. To host a site like one of these, the first thing needed is a domain name.
A domain name, Google.com and Ebay.com are domain names for example, is what you type in the location bar on a web browser to connect you to a website. Without getting overly technical, your web browser will look up the domain name through a process called Domain Name Service (DNS), and converts the human-understandable domain name to the numeric location (IP address) on the web where the site is hosted, and voila, your web browser and you are connected to the website you were looking for.
A question that props up every now and again from people I talk to about domain names is the question of ownership. Since domain names are registered for a finite period of time, some people consider domain ownership more like a lease than outright ownership of a tangible good, and that’s the question we often see. “When I register a domain with you, do I own the domain or does the domain registrar? Am I leasing the domain from you?” While there are some similarities between leasing and domain ownership, there are some significant differences.
When you lease a car, for example, the car dealer is selling the car to the finance company, and you will sign a lease agreement that allows you full use of the car, provided you make your payments to the leasing company. At the end of the lease term, you’ll have the option to release, buy the car outright for a fixed price, or walk away from the car. At lease end, you have the choice to take ownership of the car or leave it to the finance company. While you are leasing the car, you cannot for example choose to sell the car to someone else.
With domain name registration, things are different. When you register domain name, you will provide your domain registrar with contact information, namely your first and last name, company name if you’re registering the domain for a company, snail mail (postal) and email address, and phone (and optional fax) number. This information will go into the public Whois record for your domain name. The person or organization listed as the Organizational or Owner contact in the Whois record is the legal owner of the domain name.
In the case where your domain registrar provides free Whois Privacy with registration (which few do), the legal ownership does get more complicated. Ownership is proxied through the provider of the privacy service, but all you need do to revert ownership to yourself is disable the privacy service. In essence you still own the domain.
Similar to that car you lease or buy, domain names can have value. There are people called domainers who speculate in trading domain names. While inexpensive to register, domain names can gain significant value. The top-grossing sale of a domain name is 2011 was personalloans.com. It sold for $1,000,000!
Where domain ownership is different from that of other tangible goods is on your need to keep your domain name renewed. All domain registrations are for a finite period of time, typically from 1 to 10 years. When the registration time elapses, you will cease to own the domain name. In most cases you will be able to renew your domain for a period of time after expiry and recover ownership, but that’s a topic for another article. As long as you keep your registration current, your ownership is secured.