Frank: Hi Phil, thank you for taking the time to chat with me today about one of your latest projects, SafeLookup.com. In recent weeks we have heard a lot about people that are concerned about the privacy and safety of their domain lookups, especially after they saw some of the names they were checking being registered by someone else the next day. SafeLookup.com claims to protect the registrants from those risks. Can you please explain to us how this goal is achieved?

Phil: Hi Frank, thank you for the opportunity to speak about SafeLookup.com. Basically what we do is allow our members to compare the names they wish to search for, against a database of registered domains obtained from the registry zone file. This eliminates the possibility of the registrar or registry selling information to third parties or using it for their own means.

Frank: The only downside of this system might be that it could possibly show names as available that do not have nameservers listed on them. But I would imagine that the number of names where this occurs is quite low.

Phil: That is true, we can not provide 100% accurate results because of the names without nameservers not being in the zone file. In the tests we’ve performed the number of domains without nameservers is less than 1%.

Frank: So did you get the idea to develop this service after reading the recent reports about “unsafe” lookups?

Phil: All the recent reports actually reminded me of a private tool I used years ago. At the time the tool was overly cumbersome and wasn’t that useful once live bulk lookups started becoming available.

The idea of creating a new tool for the public to use in order to safely check domains was a spin off of the original bulk availability tool.

Frank: Are there any plans to introduce any user fees for access to this service at any point? What’s your revenue model?

Phil: We plan to keep the bulk availability service free for all users, and will be expanding it to cover a number of other extensions in the coming weeks and months.

In order to generate revenue to pay for the programming and servers we have a number of tools we are working on that may use a paid model. We are also perusing partnerships and advertising opportunities with companies in the domain registration and parking business.

Ultimately I don’t expect SafeLookup.com to be a revenue producing project, but as long as it doesn’t end up costing too much to operate and maintain I’ll be content.

Frank: Thanks Phil for your time and for offering this new services to our community.