Paging Tatty
Call from Mr Jobs' lawyers for you sir.
Apple may have paid millions for the domain name iCloud.com, but it seems to have left dozens of related domains in the hands of former iCloud owner Xcerion. The company is expected to announce details of iCloud – rumoured to be some kind of cloud-based music service – at its Worldwide Developer Conference next week. …
Most registrars should offer you the chance (!) to pay them a bit more money per annum and put their details down as the registrar, but in such a way as not to fall foul of ICANN rules. I'd imagine it's most useful for domains relating to small businesses operating out of residential properties...
I need to take a moment to thank the clever adolescents who took the time to reply to my post. I bet your parents are proud of you!
(Although, to be honest, I was hoping that someone might reply who had some personal knowledge and experience with such services. But then again, this *is* the internet, after all, where people can be that which, in real life, they are not: in this case, "clever".)
Believe me, I am *just* as impressed with you as your grandparents will be, when they hear about this from your mother!
Thanks again!
: )
but I think the idea of a "privacy service" would maybe be in violation of one or more relevant RFC's which I'm not prepared to research for you.
Not that an RFC is a real law of course.
However, law or not the registrant of a domain is *supposed* to be identifiable and contactable.
Some companies try to get around this by registering domains through shell companies but even this is not too hard for the determined sleuth to bypass, seeing that registered companies are also supposed to be traceable to a person / corp as well.
There have been several examples that I fail to recall the exact details for where MegaCorp X has registered domain Y using proxy company Z, only for it all to come undone when somebody looks up who the directors of proxy company Z are only to find that they are all employees of, or have prior dealings with, MegaCorp X.
If there are "privacy companies" who you could register your domains through then I've never heard of such a thing. The mainstream domain registrars would probably balk at violating whatever RFC's apply just to ensure that they are not stripped of their registrar status.
It would be possible I suppose for a company to set itself up as some sort of "private domain registration proxy service" but to be honest how much value would apple get using such a service? As soon as somebody noticed that icloud.com has been registered/purchased by "Barry's Discreet Domain Registration Service" then putting 2 and 2 together wouldn't be all that hard and we would see the same speculation regarding apple buying the domain that we are already seeing.
Besides that, using Barry's Discreet Domain Reg would not be without it's risks as Barry would effectively *own* the icloud.com domain that apple want to register and would do so until such a time that they transfered it over to apple.
Who's to say that Barry might decide that transferring icloud.com over to apple might be worth an extra premium for the privilege?
However I may be wrong too. It has been known to happen.
"With previous high-profile Apple launches, products have long been on the market before the company has turned its attention to the corresponding domain names."
Well, they could hardly launch a web service without a domain name to hitch it to now could they?
What exactly did you expect them to do? Tell people to enter an IP address into their nav bar and then go grab the domain name later?