The global domain naming authority, ICANN, recently launched an investigation into, and issued a warning about the risk of domain name "front running", or the practice of unscrupulous web operators hijacking the results of domain name searches, then re-selling them to the original searcher for a profit.
How is this possible? Sometimes sites either share or sell the query data, or act on it directly and register the name because somebody else already demonstrated interest in it.
With domain names becoming increasingly more valuable (witness Apple's reported seven-figure payment for iphone.com), it is paramount that interested parties attempting to lookup availability of desired domain names be secure in the knowledge that their lookups are guaranteed to be private and that the facilitating party not act upon those lookups by "front running" the domains by selling the query data or registering the names themselves.
In response to this extremely unscrupulous practice, one of the domain lookup sites has offered a guarantee of non-interference with such search activity.
Mark Jeftovic, President and Founder of easyDNS, goes on record today to warrant that:
Domain lookup data at easyWHOiS or any other website operated by easyDNS has always been private and has never been shared with any third party
Data revealing domains that are still available for registration have never been "front runned" or otherwise registered by easyDNS or any related party.
For more information, visit http://www.easyWhois.com
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