Topic awaiting preservation: About .de domains (Page 1 of 1)

Yesterday I bought a new domain for me, a .de domain.

I am not German and I have no relation to Germany (besides liking a lot the stuff they made - "wow, this is made in Germany!") and the reason I wanted a .de domain is that many common Portuguese words end in "de", so I chose one of these words, "atitude", that means 'attitude' (but speaks very differently), and so my new domain is atitu.de.

It's very small, it's nice, it's a good Portuguese word, so I bought it and I have a plan to make something interesting with it. And the price, although a bit more than the regular .com and .net domains, is not that much expensive.

So, why tell you all this?

Because, when I was reading about buying a .de domain, godaddy.com, the registrar that I used, explained that I needed at least that the admin contact were someone with a German address and if I didn't have one, no problem, godaddy would provide one for me.

So I signed it.

But now, when I go to my godaddy control panel, I see that my admin contact is NOT a German person, but myself. But the domain is up and running, I mean , there is already a welcome page there, provided by godaddy. If you go to the whois service from godaddy itself, you will see that I am the registrant, the admin contact and the technical contact, just like I informed, when I signed it.

And then comes the weird part. Today, I was browsing the web and I found this site, hexillion.com, that has a unified whois service (http://www.hexillion.com/whois/) that can search the real German domain database (because godaddy only shows info from .de domains registered with them). I found out, for instance, that the official German whois server is located at whois.denic.de and I found out that my admin contact at the German database is not me, but a German guy named Marcus Ross.

Well, it gets weirder. I searched about who the hell is this guy and using his name and address, I found that he works for Verisign, in Germany. A little more research and I found that he is an important guy at the German Verisign branch.

BTW, Network Solutions, that once was owned by Verisign, also sells .de domains and they also say that the .de domains are now public available to the world. They also provide a "German proxy contact information" if we don't have one (just like godaddy did).

So, my question is: what do you think of all this? Do you think there is something wrong going on?

Not really.

What probably happens is that GoDaddy is probably a reseller of .de domains for Verisign. Verisign probably offers the German admin contact service and uses one of their employees to make it legit. Godaddy simply passes this service along.

Then just because they don't think you need to know who the German fellow is they have a flag on the site that just fills in all the info with your own.



.:[ Never resist a perfect moment ]:.