Your Domain Name Is YOUR Domain Name

Recently, we’ve encountered a few dealers who have been stuck in a very unfortunate limbo situation – A few dealer website providers from the lower end of the food chain have started to engage in malicious “cybersquatting”, and they’re holding several dealers hostage.

According to the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (a US federal law), cybersquatting is “registering, trafficking in, or using a domain name with bad faith intent to profit from the goodwill of a trademark belonging to someone else.”

Typically, a cybersquatter is someone who purchases a domain name related to a business or trademark with the intent of selling it to the trademark owner at a highly inflated price. In these recent cases we’ve run into, the service providers are refusing to release the dealer’s domain name when the dealer cancels his service. I’m assuming that it’s some sort of misguided retention strategy (“We’ll make it so hard for them to leave that they’ll have to stay with us”), but honestly, it just doesn’t make sense.

Your domain name is YOUR domain name. Once you buy a domain name and associate it with a website, that domain name starts to generate value in the search engines.  Your Google PageRank and all of your SEO efforts and backlinks depend on that domain name. You’ve also got business cards and marketing materials with your URL printed on them. If you’re running ads on radio or television, your website is probably featured in every single ad. If you decide to change providers and your current provider refuses to release your domain name, it’s a significant blow to your business.

These providers are also using very questionable tactics to ensnare the dealers.  When a dealer signs up with one of these providers, the sign up process institutes an agreement to the company’s User Agreement – but of course, none of the dealers are told this, so they can’t read through the long agreement to see the hidden “fine print” – There’s a single sentence under the heading “Domains” that reads:

Domain names purchased by (provider) become the sole property of (provider) and will not be released to the Dealer.

So it’s spelled right out in their agreement… and when a dealer tries to leave, they’ll send out an email that says, “hey, you agreed to our User Agreement when you signed up… notice the line about domain names…” – And there’s nothing the dealer can do…

Also, if you’re changing providers, be cautious – these providers will tell new customers that they need to transfer their domain name to the provider as part of the setup process, and as soon as that transfer happens, the provider now owns the domain name. Regardless of the provider you use, it’s NEVER necessary to transfer ownership or registration of your domain name in order to get a dealer website.

At AutoRevo, we know that the modern auto dealer depends on the Internet to survive. You’ve most likely spent years building your online presence, and that all rests on your domain name. When we bring on a new dealer who’s buying a new URL, we suggest  that they purchase their domain name on their own; but on occasion, dealers ask us to purchase the name for them. In these cases, the dealer still retains complete ownership of the name – it just doesn’t make sense to handle it any other way. Holding on to a dealer’s domain name after they’ve decided to use a different provider is bad business, pure and simple.