UDRP: How to become a Domain Administrator?

[meowmeow]

I have noticed that some published cases recently do not mention the name of the respondent, there is the "domain administrator" instead. Is this a new development and the respondent can nowadays request for their name to not be published? Or is it because of registrars' privacy services substituting the registrant info with "domain administrator"? If its the latter, how to know which registrars can do that?

 

[jberryhill]

A recurring problem with the way domains are registered is that it can be ambiguous whether a domain name is registered by an individual or a business entity.

Currently, registrants are asked to provide a:

Registrant Name:

and

Organization:

So imagine that you are a multibillion dollar corporation, and your IT manager in charge of domain names is some guy named Fred Jones. You are not going to have your domain names registered as:

Registrant Name: Fred Jones
Registrant Organization: BigCompany Inc.

Because Fred Jones makes peanuts for a salary and after you fire him in your latest round of job cuts, or if there are going to be twenty different people rotating through that job over the next few years, you are not going to leave open the question of whether the domain name belongs to your company or to Fred Jones personally.

Consequently, most large organizational domain registrants will simply leave the "Registrant Name:" as a role account of some kind like "Domain Administrator".

There's nothing magical about it. You put "Domain Administrator" in the "Name" field, and you put your business organization in the "Organization" field.

But, if the idea here is yet another variation on the age-old question of "How do I register a domain name anonymously" then the goal is an exceedingly dumb one for reasons that have been posted countless times.

 

[Bravo Mod Team]

I have noticed that some published cases recently do not mention the name of the respondent, there is the "domain administrator" instead.

It's based on the name shown on the WHOIS data.

Many companies use "Domain admin" or "Domain administrator" as the registrant name if the domain is owned by an organization: Learn more.

Edit: John provided a more in-depth answer.

 

[jberryhill]

HOWEVER... there has been a problem with this approach lately, since GoDaddy is suppressing the "Organization" provided in public data AND from data reported to UDRP providers.

The upshot is that GoDaddy registered names are being reported as registered to "Domain Administrator" with no other clarifying data.

That's a red flag for UDRP panelists who are going to (a) assume there was no organizational registrant and (b) be skeptical of anyone showing up to say, "yes, I'm 'Domain Administrator'".

This is a huge problem.