According to "Whois" searches today, the registrations for most of the crown jewels in AOL Time Warner"s Internet address portfolio have expired.
AOLTimeWarner.com, the domain name used by the media conglomerate for its corporate home page, lapsed on Jan. 9. A number of other AOL registrations expired last year, including AOL.com, Netscape.com, Winamp.com, and ICQ.com, domain records showed today. AOL"s Compuserve.com domain, which hosts the company"s own system for checking Internet name registrations, is perhaps the most delinquent, having expired Oct. 4, 2001.
A participant in an online forum at the WebmasterWorld.com site observed Monday that the domain registration for Dmoz.org, the home page of Netscape"s Open Directory Project, expired on Jan. 2.
Typically when a consumer fails to renew a domain after a grace period, the registrar that processed the registration will instruct Verisign, which operates the central registry of domain name records, to delete the registration. Once a domain has been purged from the registry, the name is available for registration by others on a first-come basis.
AOL officials today said a software glitch in the company"s domain registration system is producing inaccurate information during domain name "Whois" searches. "I can assure you with great confidence that the domain names we have on file have not expired," said AOL spokesman Nicholas Graham, who reported that AOL will update its system so that the expiration dates are correctly displayed. According to Graham, AOL has designated all of its domain names to renew automatically when they reach their expiration.
AOL"s domain registrations are all held by the company"s own domain registration business, which operates a minimal homepage at https://www.registrar.aol.com .
One of the first registrars accredited by ICANN in 1999, AOL has yet to begin taking registrations from the public – despite predictions from analysts that the company would develop a robust domain business aimed at consumers and would give the incumbent, Verisign, some heavy competition.