ENom

Infobox Dotcom company
company_name = eNom
company_
company_type = private
genre =
foundation = 1997
founder =
location_city =
location_country =
location = Redmond, Washington USA
locations =
area_served =
key_people =
industry = domain name registration
products =
services =
revenue =
operating_income =
net_income =
owner =
num_employees =
parent =
divisions =
subsid =
company_slogan =
url = http://www.enom.com


caption =
alexa = ~5000
website_type =
language = English
advertising =
registration =
launch_date =
current_status =
footnotes =
intl =

eNom, Inc. is an ICANN-accredited [cite web | url = http://www.icann.org/registrars/accreditation-qualified-list.html | title = Descriptions and Contact Information for ICANN-Accredited Registrars | publisher = ICANN | date = 2008-05-03 | accessdate = 2008-06-01 ] domain name registrar and Web hosting company that also sells other products closely tied to domain names, such as SSL certificates, e-mail services, and Website building software. As of 2007, it was the second largest domain name registrar, managing over 8 million domains [cite web|url=http://www.domaintools.com/internet-statistics/registrar-stats-2007.php|title=2007 ICANN Registrar Statistics|publisher=Name Intelligence, Inc.|date=2007|accessdate=2008-02-25] .

Company history

eNom was founded in 1997 in Redmond, Washington. It operates a reseller business: eNom acts essentially as the wholesaler; eNom’s resellers sell domains and other services under their own branding. eNom also operates retail site eNomCentral.com and operates a bulk business through BulkRegister, a formerly free-standing company which eNom acquired in late 2006. [http://www.dnjournal.com/cover/2007/january.htm ] With this acquisition, eNom rose to second on the list of domain name registrars.

In May 2006, eNom was one of the original businesses that were acquired to form privately held Demand Media [cite web | url = http://www.demandmedia.com | title = Demand Media Web site] , headquartered in Santa Monica, California. [cite web | url = http://www.generation.com/2006_05_01.html | title = For These Sites, Their Best Asset Is a Good Name | date = 2006-05-01 | accessdate = 2008-06-01 ] Demand Media is an Internet media company that owns social networking sites and their platform technology. Each site connects private individuals and the content they create with other individuals with similar interests. Examples of Demand Media social networking properties include [http://www.trails.com/ Trails.com] and [http://www.golflink.com/ GolfLink.com] . Demand Media has also [http://venturebeat.com/2008/03/04/demand-media-plucks-pluck-for-75-million/ purchased] Pluck, which provides social networking tools for other media sites, including [http://usatoday.com/ USAToday.com] and [http://www.washingtonpost.com/ WashingtonPost.com] . Within Demand Media, eNom continues to operate as a domain name registrar and as the [http://www.demandmedia.com/contactus.asp registrar platform] for its media properties.

Accreditations and awards

eNom is an ICANN- [http://www.icann.org/registrars/accreditation-qualified-list.html accredited] registrar and has been a Better Business Bureau [http://alaskaoregonwesternwashington.bbb.org/WWWRoot/Report.aspx?site=114&bbb=1296&firm=64002064 Accredited Business] since 2002 and currently has a "satisfactory" record, which BBB describes, in part, as "company has...properly addressed matters referred by the BBB."

eNom has won the following awards from Name Intelligence, the domain research corporation that bestows the most prominent annual awards in the domain industry: [ [http://www.dnjournal.com/cover/2006/may-drt-page3.htm 2006 Name Intelligence awards] ] [ [http://www.dnjournal.com/articles/events/domain-roundtable-2007-page2.htm 2007 Name Intelligence awards] ] [ [http://www.dnjournal.com/archive/lowdown/2008/dailyposts/04-20-08.htm 2008 Name Intelligence awards] ]

* 2002-2008 Best ICANN Reseller Registrar
* 2005-2007 User’s Choice Award
* 2005-2007 Outstanding Drop Catcher

eNom was [http://www.inc.com/inc5000/2007/company-profile.html?id=2006292 named] #292 in Inc. Magazine’s 500 fastest growing private companies in 2006.

Resellers

As of March 2008, eNom [http://www.enom.com/statistics.asp states] that it has over 99,000 resellers, of which over 28,000 are active.

In February 2007, eNom dropped RegisterFly as a reseller citing consumer complaints.cite news|date=2007-02-19|author=Burke Hansen|title=Registerfly on the fly, ICANN on the run|publisher=The Register|url=http://www.theregister.com/2007/02/19/registerfly_angry_customers/|accessdate=2008-02-25]

BulkRegister

In July 2006, eNom bought out competitor BulkRegister. Prior to that, BulkRegister was a member-supported service where clients were not resellers, but companies large enough to pay an annual membership fee to acquire low registration fees on their domain name registrations, due to the volume they potentially register.

eNom maintains BulkRegister as a separate service [cite web|title=eNom BulkRegister web site|url=http://bulk.enom.com|accessdate=2008-02-25] .

Spam control

Spamming requires [http://www.uoregon.edu/~joe/maawg12/domains-talk.pdf infrastructure] of which domain names are one component. Spam is defined and regulated in different ways by different jurisdictions (see, for example, the [http://www.spamlaws.com/federal/summ108.shtml US CAN-SPAM Act] ). Spamhaus [http://www.spamhaus.org/definition.html describes] spam thus: "Spam is an issue about consent, not content . . . if the message was sent unsolicited and in bulk then the message is spam." eNom posts a [http://www.enom.com/terms/AbusePolicy.asp "zero tolerance spam policy"] .

One metric of the relationship between domain name registrars and spam is posted on the URI Blacklist (URIBL), which [http://www.uribl.com/about.shtml “lists domains that appear in spam, NOT where they were sent from”] . Between March and May 2008, the [http://rss.uribl.com/nic/ real-time list] on URIBL.com eNom's rank ranged between first and third [ [http://rss.uribl.com/nic Realtime URI Blacklist] ] in absolute numbers of blocked domains [ [http://rss.uribl.com/nic/ENOM_INC_.html Blacklisted eNom domains] ] , and between 37th and 48th in the percentage of domains that are blacklisted.

A second method for quantifying the relationship between domain name registrars and spam is shown in a [http://www.uoregon.edu/~joe/maawg12/domains-talk.pdf talk] presented by Joe St. Sauver at the 2008 Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group MAAWG. The method compares the number of names at each registrar that have been blocklisted by the SURBL method to the total number of .com and .net names at each domain name registrar. Dr. St. Sauver’s calculations rank eNom first in absolute numbers of all blocklisted domains (page 47 of the talk). When normalized for the total number of domains under management, eNom ranks 18th in percentage of names on the blocklist (page 55 of the talk).

The results posted for both methods aggregate all the domain names that use eNom’s name servers; they do not distinguish between the names sold and managed directly by eNom, and those sold and managed by its resellers.

Law enforcement

Domain name registrars walk a line between customer service and [http://www.icann.org/registrars/ra-agreement-17may01.htm#3 ICANN rules] , which include a requirement to cooperate with law enforcement: “Registrar shall abide by applicable laws and governmental regulations”.

In March 2008, a New York Times storycite news|date=2008-03-04|author=Adam Liptak|title=A Wave of the Watch List, and Speech Disappears|publisher=The New York Times|url=http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/04/us/04bar.html?_r=2&scp=1&sq=liptak&st=nyt&oref=slogin&oref=slogin] , mentions that eNom is known to disable domain names which appear on a US Treasury Department blacklist. It describes eNom’s disabling of a European travel agent’s Web sites advertising travel to Cuba, which appeared on a U.S. Treasury Department [http://www.treas.gov/offices/enforcement/ofac/sdn/sdnlist.txt list] published by the Office of Foreign Assets Control OFAC. The article’s sources use words varying from “scandal” to “legally required” to describe “how Web sites owned by a British national operating via a Spanish travel agency can be affected by U.S. law”, especially when the operation is as “mysterious” as that of the OFAC list.

Footnotes

ee also

* List of top ranking domain registrars
* ICANN

External links

* [http://www.enom.com Official website]