<<thanks to Niagara Symphony for pointing us
to the following article from the Globe and Mail>>

'Domain slamming' surfaces on the Web

KEVIN MARRON
From Thursday's Globe and Mail (December 17, 2003)

An aggressive marketing tactic known as "domain slamming" is confusing many
e-business owners, causing some to unwittingly switch Internet service
providers and risk bringing their on-line operations to a halt, according
to
Mark Jeftovic, co-founder and president of Toronto-based easyDNS
Technologies Inc.

The term is borrowed from an aggressive tactic used by upstart phone
carriers that persuade subscribers to transfer their service without
realizing they are doing so.

It's a trend that is prompting ISPs to warn clients to read invoices
carefully before paying the annual fees for registering their Web sites.

Mr. Jeftovic's company is in the business of registering domain names - the
names used to identify Web sites - and the company also provides services
that direct traffic to client Web sites by interpreting the numerical codes
that identify each site.

It is a confusing and complicated business for anyone who is not steeped in
the technology that underlies the Internet and the complicated procedures
involved in registering the ownership of domain names. And it is because it
is so complicated and confusing that some Web site owners are being led
astray, Mr. Jefovic says.

He says many of his customers have received letters in the mail that they
thought were invoices. The letters advised them to pay their annual fees or
risk having access to their domain name frozen. Some customers assumed that
this was an official notice and paid the fees, not realizing that they were
sending their payment to a different registrar than the one they originally
signed up with and were, in effect, transferring to a new service provider.

Having transferred their registration to a new company without realizing
it,
some customers discovered that their Web sites were no longer accessible,
because they were not getting the additional technological assistance that
easyDNS had been providing, Mr. Jefovic says.

"You wake up one morning and your Web site is down, your e-mail is not
going
anywhere, none of your employees can receive e-mail and your customers
can't
find your Web site. That has happened to our customers and it's not
pretty,"
he says.

Tim Kutt, president of Golden Triangle Online Inc., a Kitchener,
Ont.,-based
Internet Services Provider, says some of his customers have had a similar
experience. "They get a letter that looks like an official government
document and then they find that they have moved [their registration]
without even knowing they are moving. They think it's a government
organization or us that is doing it."

Elliott Noss, chief executive officer of Toronto-based Tucows Inc., the
world's second-largest registrar of Internet domain names, has also warned
clients about domain slamming.

"In the early part of this year, there was a real uptick in the level of
confusing marketing - either confusing or deceptive marketing - that went
out to end users," Mr. Noss says.

In July of last year, the federal Competition Bureau issued a warning about
documents that appeared to be invoices sent out by a business called the
"Internet Registry of Canada." Under a letterhead that resembled the Maple
Leaf flag, the document informed Web-site owners that their domain name
registration was about to expire, urged them to renew and provided a form
for making a credit-card payment.

"Complaints received by the Competition Bureau indicate that the mailings
from the 'Internet Registry of Canada' give the impression that it is
affiliated with the Government of Canada or that it is an officially
sanctioned agency registering domain names in Canada. The 'Internet
Registry
of Canada' is not associated with any government agency," the Competition
Bureau advisory stated.

Some of the concerns raised by Internet service providers this year relate
to promotional material sent out by 1446513 Ontario Ltd., which operates as
the Domain Registry of Canada and the Domain Registry of America Inc.
Company representatives declined to be interviewed, but referred a reporter
to legal documents filed in connection with a defamation suit launched by
1446513 Ontario Ltd. against Tucows and related companies.

The document filed by Joseph D'Angelo of the Toronto law firm Lang Michener
states that there is no affiliation between the Domain Registry of Canada
and the Internet Registry of Canada, though it admits there is one common
director between the Internet Registry of Canada and the Domain Registry of
America.

Letters that the Domain Registry of Canada sent out carried the symbol of a
maple leaf and not the Canadian flag, states the document, which notes that
the letter informed readers: "This notice is not an invoice rather an easy
means of payment should you decide to register or renew your existing
domain
names with the Domain Registry of Canada."

"The plaintiffs' notices are not in any way misleading, deceptive or likely
to cause confusion," Mr. D'Angelo's document states.

Gabriel Ahad, director of communications for the Canadian Internet
Registration Authority, the not-for-profit body mandated by the federal
government to operate and manage the .ca domain, says domain name holders
need to educate themselves more about the process involved in registering
names.

"It is unfortunate, but in any highly competitive and newly emerging
industry we are unfortunately going to see some parties take advantage of
people," he says.

Mr. Noss says it is only the careless who fall prey to domain slamming and
there are several steps that organizations should take to avoid this
happening. They should make sure that there is one person responsible for
maintaining the domain registration, that the contact information for that
person is filed properly and kept up to date, and they should keep track of
all the domains they own, paying attention to the expiry dates.

"Then you are almost become immune to slamming, because it occurs typically
when somebody is in receipt of something that they don't understand," says
Mr. Noss, noting that people who don't understand the process are likely to
pay what they think is an invoice, particularly if it is accompanied with a
warning that they should act quickly or lose their domain name.

"There were folks in the industry who kept sending out invoices, even after
customers transferred away from them, simply because people kept paying
them," Mr. Noss says.

Such situations are unfortunate, Mr. Jeftovic says, "because a lot of this
Internet stuff is hard enough for the man on the street to understand in
the
fist place. There are major emotional barriers to e-commerce on the
Internet
and this just adds fuel to the fire. It doesn't inspire confidence in
e-commerce structures."

Special to The Globe and Mail