11,000 Au domain names customers completely confused as Bottle Domains wins temporary reprieve
Some 11,000 customers of Nick Bolton’s Internet domain name registration business – Bottle Domains – are in total confusion at the moment.
Early last week they got an email from industry regulator, au Domain Administration Ltd, telling them that auDA had decided to de-license Bottle Domains.
The email said that auDA was taking control of their domain names and they had to transfer their domain names to another auDA approved registrar.
Bolton then emailed them saying that , helpfully, he owned another auDA accredited domain name registrar business. He said they should transfer their names to that business.
Somewhat confusingly, for all concerned, the other business is known as Bottle, (i.e. not two words as in Bottle Domains, just one word – Bottle).
But both Bolton and auDA began to change their message on Thursday after Boltons lawyers at Landers and Rogers were unexpectedly granted a temporary injunction on the de-accreditation in the Supreme Court of Victoria.
Bottle Domains changed its customer advice to ‘do nothing’, whilst auDA went back to the Supreme Court seeking clarification of the situation.
On Friday the Court appears to have told auDA that, until it holds a full hearing on this Wednesday the 23rd of April, Bottle Domains would have to be given back control of its customers domain names.
Long-standing auDA critics, such as NetRegistry’s Larry Bloch, have publicly attacked the auDA action.
Both Bloch and at least one of his senior executives have been postings criticisms of the auDA decision in various on-line fora. (See for example Bloch and Jonathan Crossfield’s postings to IT News.)
NetRegistry has an auDA accredited .Au registrar business itself, and also owns one of the larger Au registrars, - Planet Domain.
Last year NetRegistry also bought, via a call option agreement, what auDA decreed ís “effective control “ of another accredited Au registrar - TPP Domains.
However Nick Bolton has made numerous enemies from his $4.5mill ‘greenmailing’ of Brisconnections.
Moreover Bottle Domains has been exposed as playing fast and loose with its claims to PCI accreditation in the wake of a security breach that saw the business customer records, including credit-card details, offered for sale on a hackers web-site.
Indeed, eCommerce Report published screen dumps from the hackers web-site showing the records being sold.
auDA’s decision will certainly be a significant blow to Nick Bolton’s Internet domain name businesses should the Supreme Court uphold auDA’s right to terminate Bottle Domains accreditation.
At this stage, of course, it is uncertain how the Supreme Court will decide on Wednesday.
But it is relevant to point out that this is not the first time that auDA has de-accredited an Au domain name registrar.
Canberra based Au registrar - Capital Networks - lost its auDA accreditation a few years back.
For more information see ,br />
www.auda.org.au
www.bottledomains.com.au
www.bottle.com.au
www.itnews.com.au
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