Being a good front runner
When it comes to startups and long-distance runners, being a front runner is a good thing. It’s illegal elsewhere (such as in the stock market), however, and the term “domain front running” is now being used to describe what can happen if a company unethically snatches your domain idea in between the time you search for a domain and try to register it.
ICANN, the company the US government put in charge of assigning and regulating domain names, has issued a 10-page advisory (pdf) about domain front running. It’s an interesting read, but DomainTools, a site whose services we often recommend for researching domains, has the CliffNotes version:
- Avoid address bar guessing
- Avoid search engines that don’t make a billion dollars a year in revenue
- Avoid browser plug-ins that send data back to the Internet
- Go directly to trusted registrars and whois companies
To help minimize the risk of domain front running, we started offering our own whois search here in 2006. We don’t save or share your whois searches with anyone.
