Companies and web masters that assigned long-term management rights of Internet domain names to Internet Name Group (ING) will be reading the fine print on their contracts this week.

The Melbourne-based company, which registered domain names for thousands of Australian and international buyers planning to build websites, has left its office and is not answering phone calls or e-mail.

The St Kilda Road office of the controversial domain name reseller was locked on Friday last week and the company directors were not answering calls on their private numbers.

The company, which also trades as Internet Name Protection, has been censured in the past by competitors and the .au Domain Authority for its aggressive marketing in seeking domain-name renewals from companies with which it had no prior business relationship.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has an action in Federal Court against ING and director Mark Spektor. An ACCC spokeswoman said she could not comment on the reseller's current status, but said that the action would probably continue, whether the company was trading or not.

Interlocutory orders were already preventing ING from breaching competition rules, she said, so the court action was more about what the company had allegedly done in the past.

A spokesman for the company's landlord, Premier Property Group, said he was also trying to contact Internet Name Group.

Portions of the company's website were not operating and the company's telephone message service was full.

Chief executive of the .au Domain Authority, Chris Disspain, said that if ING ceased to trade, he would be concerned about people who had paid for domain-name renewals in advance.

He said he would also be concerned about any funds still held by ING from so-called "long-term" registrations, in which customers had paid for up to 10 years worth of renewals in advance.

ING had hoped to become a fully fledged registrar of .au domain names when new competition and domain names were released under the .au country code in July.

However, the .au Domain Authority suspended ING's accreditation as a registrar because of the ACCC action. ING was still free to operate as a registrar for several other popular domain name categories and a reseller of com.au names after buying them off another registrar.

Meanwhile, auDA said last week it would revoke a domain name from a buyer who tried to auction a com.au name on eBay. auDA said it would withdraw the name sport.com.au from the person who won it in the authority's online auction earlier this year.

The unidentified person had put the name up for sale on the eBay auction site with a $900 reserve.

By the afternoon of August 15, when auDA cancelled the pending registration, no bids had been received.

AuDA chief executive Chris Disspain said the name was only recently allocated in the auction of so-called generic names, and would now be re-auctioned without the person who originally won it. He declined to name the person, but confirmed that their original winning bid was under $900.

Disspain said sale of domain names was against auDA policy.

AuDA says domain names are only licensed, rather than being owned.

By Jenny Sinclair and Glenn Mulcaster
August 20 2002
Sydney Morning Herald

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