The Author – Bart Busschots
Creative Commons
Unless otherwise stated, the content on this site is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution, Noncommercial, No Derivative Works 3.0 License
Jul
6
The Problems with the IE Domain Registry
Filed Under Computers & Tech, System Administration on July 6, 2006 at 1:28 am
For those of you who have no idea who or what the IE Domain Registry (IEDR) are, they are the people who decided who does and does not get what .ie Internet domain name. You can find out more on their home page. Below is a quote from their front page in which I have bolded the bits that I find particularly positive.
“The IEDR is an independent not-for-profit organisation that manages the .ie country code Top Level Domain (ccTLD) namespace in the public interest of the Irish and global Internet communities.
The IE Domain Registry is not a governing or regulatory body, but provides a public service for the .ie namespace on behalf of the Internet community.”
These people have a very important responsibility, they manage the Irish-branded presence on the internet. They literally determine who is good enough to belong to Ireland on the internet. Were they to genuinely live up to the bolded parts of the above quote I would have nothing but praise for them. However, my many experiences with them over many years have lead me to the conclusion that they are falling far short of these ideals.
Why This Post Now?
Since I’ve been registering .ie domain names on behalf of customers of my web services business (www.bartificer.net) for may years you may be wondering what was the final proverbial straw that prompted me to take the time to detail and present my grievances. You’d be right to wonder about that as the answer will give you an idea of the bias I am coming at this from. What I was trying to do was to register my own name, Bart Busschots, as a .ie domain name to host this blog and my personal home page. Since it is my name and since I’m resident in Ireland and am registering it on my own behalf I didn’t see any reason for problems, the IEDR did!
The bottom line is that after a lot of to-ing and fro-ing between myself, my registrar (Register365) and the IEDR I did in the end get my domain name but it was not easy and Register365 were convinced I’d never get it and that I’d be as well to quit before I expended even more time and energy on it. Thankfully I found line of attack that worked. Some would call it a loop hole, I’m not sure I would because I see myself as being fully entitled to the domain and hence not needing to resort to petty trickery.
The key phases in the discussion went something like this:
- I requested the domain on the grounds that it’s my personal name.
- The IEDR refused on the ground that they only allow private individuals register two initials and a two digit number, hence the name I should apply for was bb26.ie.
- I was far from happy so I asked Register365 if there was anything I could do to get round this obvious lunacy. They advised me to register Bart Busschots as a business name, that way I would be automatically entitled to the domain. I was not prepared to go to such rediculous lengths for a domain name so I ask for a plan c. Register365 re-submited my application in the ‘discressionary’ category, pointing out that it was to be used for a blog.
- The IEDR refused again, saying I should apply under the personal name category. (oh dear, I see circles forming here!). Register365 advised me that it was probably a lost cause but told me that occasionally rining the IEDR in person helps.
- I read all the IEDR rules VERY carefully, decided that a blog is a publication and since this blog is called ‘Bart Busschots’ I should be able to get BartBusschots.ie for it. I rang the the IEDR and tried to make my case on the phone but the lady didn’t seem to want to deal with me over the phone so she told me to send an email. I did and worded it very carefully stressing that the domain was for an existing electronic publication and giving them the current URL to this blog.
- The IEDR agreed to give me my domain. YAY … victory for the little guy for once!
Private Citizens Don’t Get a Fair Service
The first major issue I have with the way the IEDR is run is the total imbalance between the way companies and individuals are treated. Companies can register some domain names with complete ease. They can have their name and their trade marks and if they ask nicely sometimes abbreviated versions of their names or trade marks. What can private individuals get? TWO initials and a number! That is completely unfair towards the average Irish person. They are being denied proper access to what is after all their ccTLD. Does that strike you as being “in the public interest of the Irish and global Internet communities” or providing “a public service”? It certainly doesn’t strike me as either of those things.
I can see how the IEDR would argue that, because they only give companies, educational institutions and government bodies easy access to useful domain names, there are no problems with domain name piracy within the .ie TLD. That is certainly true, but because of this the .ie ccTLD is also horrendously under-used. Simply put it has been over-regulated out of all usefulness for most ordinary people. There is a balance that needs to be struck here and I think the IEDR have missed completely.
Too Many Hoops and Barriers
In general it takes time and effort to get a .ie domain name. Although I have had it go smoothly and quickly on some occasions in general there are complications. This involves work for the person registering the domain and work for the IEDR. It strikes me that the majority of this work is pointless. As I see it, less time spent on rules and regulations, and more time spent on actually helping customers registering domains, would be a great improvement for the IEDR!
The impression I have gotten over my years of dealing with the IEDR is that they always appear to be looking for reasons to say ‘no’ rather than trying to help customers resolve genuine problems so they can say ‘yes’ to something that is acceptable to both parties. Basically, the IEDR always make me feel like Oliver Twist going up asking for more. To me that seems like the wrong vibes for a company that claims to be providing a public service to be sending out.
Too Expensive
Including VAT it costs nearly 90 Euro to register a .ie domain. Compare that to less than 15 Euro for a .com, .org or .net, and about 20 Euro for a .be and a .eu and you’ll soon see that getting a .ie is an expensive proposition! Hang on a sec you may think, the IEDR are a not-for-profit organisation, why are they so dramatically more expensive than other European ccTLDs? The answer lies with the previous problem, they spent too much time making and implementing too many rules and making too many people jump through too many hoops to charge any less. It takes time and money to pay the bureaucrats that do that work! You also can’t automate things too much when so much interaction is needed with the client.
The Result
Too few Irish people actually bother with a .ie address. Instead, many Irish people opt for a .com addresses because they are cheaper and much easier to get. As I see it this is not in the best interest of the Irish Internet Community, or indeed the global Internet Community. Hence I would argue that the IEDR are failing to live up to their own stated ideals and should start working to remedy this as soon as possible.
To really hammer the point home I will point out that during my interactions with the IEDR I also registered bartbusschots.be (because I’m Belgian-Irish) and bartbusschots.eu. I had previously registered bartbusschots.net. It cost me less and took me less time and effort to register these THREE domains than it did to register one .ie domain. That says it all really! At the end of the day .be should be no different to .ie but it is, I had the .be registered in 5 minutes and for just a fraction of the price of the .ie. What does Belgium know that Ireland doesn’t?
Conclusions
- The IEDR need to re-evaluate the way they do business if they really want to live up to their stated ideals.
- The IEDR currently provide a poor service to private individuals, less than other national domain registrars
- .ie domains are too hard to get
- .ie domains are too expensive
- If you are a private Irish citizen and you want to register a .ie domain, set up a blog, call it after yourself, and then apply as an electronic publication providing a link to the blog (which should ideally be running long enough to have a good cache of articles) in your request.
Excellent piece, I ended up using a CRO RBN of myname. Another way is to trademark your name, that dsounds cool imagine signing off as John Smith (TM)! but its expensive and I don’t knwo if it’s allowed.
I’m currently in the middle of trying to register domains that I neither have a trademark or registered company name for..I may actually go to the effort of doing so, because the domains carry significant weight, but Im not holding my breath..
Perhaps I’m posting kind of late in the day? However …
I have noted one or two very odd things about the .ie domain both in the distant past and in the more recent present, like today, for instance, which compel me to post. So fix yourself a ball of malt and attend to my sorry tale of woe.
To begin with, I looked into acquiring mullan.ie way back when Pluto was a planet and a couple of years before M. Busschots wrote this article.
It was the summer of 2002. I will never forget my frustration and annoyance as the shanties of Ankara emptied into the streets, roaring past my doorstep in celebration of the national team’s entry to the World Cup semi-finals and rupturing my concentration as a result. It was then that I learned I was ineligible for mullan.ie because:
a) The domain was apparently taken (“ho-hum”, I hear you say, but see “ha-ha” below).
b) I was at the time (and still am) resident in Turkey.
I said ‘apparently’ to point ‘a’ because, ha-ha, I well recall that apart from a good old 404 (meaning ‘Forbidden’ to apprentice nerds) the domain was inaccessible to my relentless attempts at access. Indeed it remains so today – the first time that I felt compelled to revisit our de facto family seat on the interwebz since that summer of Turkey’s sorry disappointment eight years ago.
As far as point ‘b’ goes, not having the faintest trace of an exotic gene to spruce up my thoroughly Irish character, I still felt it was something of a bummer to find the powers that be on the old sod would deny me the privilege of their parochial domainity when I was happily prepared to feed their exorbitant craving for paperwork with a copy of my birth certificate. Lamb sakes, I couldn’t have dibbly-doo.ie even if I were gung-ho for such a rash project.
It’s the interwebz we’re talking about here, for Christ’s sake, what does it matter where in the world I park my sorry ass?
Well, I’m beginning to wonder if, perhaps, shenanigans are not afoot? (I would prefer to believe in any amount of skullduggery over sheer incompetence and a shameful lack of imagination on my countrymen’s part.)
Going back to point ‘a’, I have had occasion to browse more than a few .ie domains during the course of my protracted Anatolian sojourn and I must say that it is very disturbing to see how often Firefox throws up the ‘The connection has timed out’ page adorned as it is with that hopeful but nevertheless ineffectual ‘Try Again’ button. This does not happen with any frequency on other domains (I would happily forgo .ro, .ru and – Heaven help us – .bg, for instance, but sadly addresses of such provenance remain hopelessly robust in their facility to point and ping and garner any amount of trojans as a consequence).
Apart from my estrangement from the clan on mullan.ie, other sites to which I have been refused access only today include letshost.ie and http://www.countmeout.ie (not that I really give a damn for leaving the church in Ireland – I doubt if Jesus would either). I have found several examples recently – to the point where the issue has become something of a recurring theme of CaitlÃn Nà Uallacháin’s internet presence as viewed from abroad.
Whatever is going on, I should say that at this point I wouldn’t take the gift of a .ie domain if they were serving it up completely free with unlimited email addresses, lucrative advertising opportunities and a competitive hosting package thrown in.