"Warehoused"
Domain Names - An Extended Public Listing
A Research Report by Benjamin Edelman
Overview
In recent years, many Internet users have become aware that certain firms register domain names not for their own use but rather for possible future sale. Such behavior is in some instances called "cybersquatting," a term ordinarily intended to suggest that domain registration is in bad faith and/or in violation of the intellectual property rights of others. But another class of domain registrations instead reflect what some refer to as "domain warehousing" -- mass registration of thousands of names that often lack specific relation to particular firms, products, or trademarks but that might nonetheless be of value to registrants in the future. Such domain names are registered by so-called "warehousers" -- businesses which then seek to sell such domains to others at somewhat greater prices. Examples of warehousers include domaincollection.com, domainsystems.com, and greatdomains.com.
In general, domain warehousing firms do not publish their full inventories of available domain names. Instead, warehousers seem to anticipate that their potential customers will learn of the possibility of purchasing such domains via the web pages distributed upon request for web access to warehousers' domains, via WHOIS listings (many of which mention "this domain is for sale" in contact information or name server fields), or via on-demand queries on warehousers' respective web sites.
Notwithstanding the warehousers' apparent intention to keep private their full listings of domain inventory, it is possible to extract such listings from publicly-available data. In my recent work, I have documented some hundreds of thousands of domains offered for sale by market-leading warehousing firms. The Documentation of Specific Warehoused Domains section below details my full findings and an extensive listing of such sites.
Documentation of Specific Warehoused Domains
For each such domain, the listing includes the domain name at issue, its current HTML page title (when available), and the name of the firm that registered it. Each listing also links to the domain's default web page (when available) as well as to an external service providing page archives for selected domains.
For each warehousing firm included in analysis, this listing gives the firm's name, the number of domains found to be registered to the firm, the firm's web address, and a link to the firm's specific warehoused domains.
A full discussion of the implications of domain warehousing is beyond the scope of this project. However, conditional on the existence of domain warehousing, documentation of the scope and specific details of this activity seems consistent with the public interest and with sensible public discussion of domain registration policies.
This work primarily reflects analysis of DNS zone files that list all active COM, NET, and ORG domains. I formed a list of domain warehousing firms via references from Yahoo and other indexes, from browsing zone file listings, and from other sources; I selected leading warehousing firms by tabulating the number of domains registered to each. I subsequently extracted from zone files all domains listing the warehouserse' respective nameservers as their nameservers of record. Additional data was collected with web bots, and data was variously analyzed and manipulated so as to form the listings above.
The results linked above reflect analysis of DNS zone files from March 31, 2002. Accordingly, these results reflect registrations as of that time, and subsequent changes are not reflected in this analysis.
The purpose of this research is primarilly academic -- to document the activity at issue for the benefit of those who seek to evaluate and ultimately make policy decisions on related matters.
This page is made available to inform discussion about the registration of Internet domain names. The data contained here is not intended for use for other purposes, and it should not be used for other purposes without first contacting the author.
Future Work & Suggesting Changes
This research documents only a portion of domain warehousing currently taking place. In particular, this research documents only registrations by certain warehousing firms. Suggestions for inclusion of additional warehousing firms should be directed to the author; pending data availability, the author will attempt to process such suggestions quickly and promptly update the listings above.
This research may in some instances wrongly characterize domains as examples of warehousing when in fact they are not; please bringany such errors to the attention of the author for prompt correction.