This may sound familiar to you, you’re going through your business mail and setting aside the bills for your payables department. Oh, here is one for our website, Liberty Names of America. I guess our domain is expiring we better renew …. uh wait a minute, we don’t use Liberty Names of America. Why are they sending me a bill? It seems that some companies are founded with at the least ill advised business policies or perhaps far worse. Over the years as the operator of a small business I have seen a number of these predatory notices. The first one years ago was for some yellow page listing. It looked just like a bill you might get from the publisher of the yellow pages you run your advertisements in, only it was for some company you’ve never heard of and some book that no-one will see. Evidently people with similar scruples decided to get into the domain name business. There was even a allegation at one time that Verisign, Inc. (formerly Network Solutions) had sent similar notices to GoDaddy.com customers. We were unable to find evidence that these allegations were proven one way or the other.

Basically what these companies do is determine when your domain names are going to expire. They then send you a notice in the present example a “Domain Expiration Notice” and they encourage you to “renew today”. They will even bundle multiple domains you might have expiring at the same time in these notices. To make matters worse the prices in these letters is likely to be much higher than what you are already paying with your current registrar. If you receive one of these notices or worse yet are the victim of these predatory practices by mistaking them as legitimate, you can report a problem to InterNIC using their Registrar Problem Report form.

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