Enom

eNom

Type of business	private
Available in	English
Founded	1997
Headquarters	Redmond, Washington United States
Industry	domain name registration
URL	http://www.enom.com

eNom, Inc. is an ICANN-accredited 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 .

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. 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, Inc., headquartered in Santa Monica, California. 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 Trails.com and GolfLink.com. Demand Media has also purchased Pluck, which provides social networking tools for other media sites, including USAToday.com and WashingtonPost.com. Within Demand Media, eNom continues to operate as a domain name registrar and as the registrar platform for its media properties.

Accreditations and Awards

eNom is an ICANN-accredited registrar and has been a Better Business Bureau 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 was named #292 in Inc. Magazine’s 500 fastest growing private companies in 2006.

Resellers

As of March 2008, eNom 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.

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.

Spam Control

Spamming requires infrastructure of which domain names are one component. Spam is defined and regulated in different ways by different jurisdictions (see, for example, the US CAN-SPAM Act). Spamhaus 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 "zero tolerance spam policy". A search on the public newsgroup news.admin.net-abuse.email shows that there are indeed posts that mention eNom. However, as of March 2008, eNom is mentioned in a relatively small number of posts compared to the other top-5 registrars:

Posts on Google spam newsgroup:

Company	Number of posts on net-abuse.email	Number of domains currently registered
Go Daddy	8700	23,939,000
eNom	1840	8,513,000
Network Solutions	3950	6,715,000
Tucows	3050	6,248,000
Melbourne IT	2470	5,011,000

A more rigorous metric of the relationship between domain name registrars and spam is posted on the URI Blacklist (URIBL), which “lists domains that appear in spam, NOT where they were sent from”. As of March 2008, the real-time list on URIBL.com ranks eNom second in absolute numbers of blocked domains (comparable to its standing as the world’s second-largest domain name registrar), and 37th in the percentage of domains that are blacklisted.

A third method for quantifying the relationship between domain name registrars and spam is shown in a 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 at 18% of all blocklisted domains, and 18th in percentage of names under management that appear on the blocklist (pages 47 and 55 of the talk).

The results posted for all three 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 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 story, 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 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.

See also

• List of top ranking domain registrars
• ICANN

External links

• Official website