Rescuing Sites From Reluctant ISPs

Internet identities and cyber properties of some businesses are being held captive by their Internet service providers.

Picture this: You’re the proud owner of Karen’s Widgets, a thriving business that wants to establish an outpost on the Internet. You hire a service provider to set up and host your Web site and to register your domain name: karenswidgets.com.

The relationship with the service provider heads south. You want to make a change, but quickly find out that breaking up is hard to do.

The old service provider either refuses to cooperate with the new provider to make the move happen, or simply ignores the phone calls, e-mails and faxes sent its way requesting the change.

Or even worse, the new provider discovers that the domain name was registered not to the business owner, but to the old service provider. Which means the domain name is, in the eyes of the registrar, not even yours to take. This mess could take weeks, if not months, to sort out.

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Who ya gonna call?

You could try someone like William Malin, president of an Internet company called Ventura Blvd., a cyber marketplace for businesses in Southern California. Malin, who does Web design and hosting, said he was spending so much of his time rescuing hostage Web sites that he created a spinoff business, Domainrescue.com (https://www.domainrescue.com) to help business owners liberate their cyber shops from providers who just can’t bear to let go.

“It can be that the previous provider is uncooperative or unresponsive or . . . has gone to sleep at the switch,” Malin said. “Some providers will not only stop you from moving, but will take your Web site down or take it functionally away from you.

“For whatever reason, an [Internet service provider] can do all kinds of things to try to prevent someone from moving,” he said.

In the last year, the Internet landscape has changed dramatically with increased competition among service providers, the addition of new domain name suffixes such as .biz and .info, and the introduction of competition into the domain name registry business. With more players involved and the potential for more confusion on the part of consumers, experts say more and more business owners may discover that they’ll have to fight to switch.

With all of these changes, especially with the addition of new registrars and new top-level domains--the Web address suffixes--there are simply growing numbers of parties involved,” said John Wong, manager of New Jersey-based Domain Registration Services, one of about 140 companies worldwide authorized to register Internet domain names. “For the consumer, it definitely can be more confusing. The consumer has to be more aware.”

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Malin says so far this year he’s moved more than four dozen accounts from other service providers to his Woodland Hills company.

Of those, “more than half required some kind of special attention,” he said, including about half a dozen that rose to the level of “hostage rescue.” Those are complicated transfers that can take a month or more.

“More often than not, a provider will be non-responsive or antagonistic to the new provider,” Malin said.

Depending on the complexity of the case, Malin may charge up to $1,000 to speed a divorce.

Earlier this year Malin worked on a “textbook” case, involving the Web site for Palm Springs-based Spa de Jour.

Marci Lacy, a partner in the resort-area day spa, used words such as “nightmare” and “quagmire” to describe the drama, which she said took her six months to straighten out.

Lacy’s company had contracted with a local ISP to build and host a Web site and register the company’s domain name. Through a series of miscommunications and “irresponsible management,” work did not proceed on the site the way Lacy had envisioned. The service provider was unresponsive.

The biggest problem with transferring to another ISP, according to Malin and Lacy, was the way the company’s two domain names--www.spadejour.com and www.spadejour.net--were registered.

In the case of the .com name, the service provider used its own address, rather than the client’s, as the address for the registered owner. That, and other glitches, clouded the spa’s claim to the name.

The .net name was registered with a registrar in Australia, which had a failed business relationship with the old provider. Because of that, the registrar refused to let go of the name. That matter has yet to be resolved. The provider has since gone out of business, according to a spokesman at another Palm Springs company that has taken over many of the defunct company’s former clients.

Meanwhile, Lacy is still tending her wounds. She said she paid about $500 to get the site built.

“But I don’t think the money was as much of a problem as the difficulty getting our domain name back,” she said. “It’s the money you lose because your [site] is not up.”

“In a business like ours, people need to be able to find us,” Lacy said.

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In some respects, Lacy was lucky, said experts who have seen cases in which the domain was registered in the name of the service provider. In those cases, they said, the business owner may have to resort to legal action.

“Rule No. 1 is, whoever is the registrant in our database, that’s the one who would have to sign our transfer authorization form,” said Scott Hemphill, legal counsel for the Pennsylvania-based Domain Bank Inc., another registrar.

Malin said no site has ever had to be rescued from him, and he’s still not sure why other companies are so reluctant to let go.

He said he routinely hears things such as: “ ‘We’re having technical problems’ or ‘Oh, I thought we had taken care of that,’ or ‘Let me have someone call you back,’ and no one ever does. There is no answer that makes any sense,” he said.

Although Malin declined to give details on the techniques he uses to “rescue” hostage Web sites, he said it involves both what you know (including the occasional electronic sleight of hand) and whom you know (like having friends in the registrar’s office), but no hacking.

And he says he’s sure there are others in his industry who’ve had to develop a liberation strategy.

“Whether they’ve given a name to the service or not, other providers have to be doing this,” he said. “I’m not the only one.”