Are you one of the many Webcentral and Melbourne IT clients that have placed Backorders on domain names? Well this may come to you as a rather big surprise that the CEO of Melbourne IT Jonathan Horne is in direct competition with you via his personal domainprotector.com.au service which uses other drop catch platforms to catch domain names on behalf of their clients. This is in direct competition to all the paying Webcentral/Melbourne IT backorder clients.
Using services like Drop.com.au that is a leading expired domain catch service, to catch an expired domains, which predominantly beats Webcentral and Melbourne IT backorder scripts.
Domain Protector has a sales team that pro-actively contacts potential buyers and offers them a service to catch an expired domains for a much higher price, with total disregard for Webcentral/Melbourne IT backorders, in many cases in direct competition. Using a service such as Drop.com.au to catch domains, Jonathan knows that they have a much higher chance to secure the domain for the domainprotector clients, while paying clients of Webcentral or Melbourne IT will have wasted their money! This could definitely be something that ACCC should look to investigate and maybe calls for a class action law suit.
The issues do not stop there however, see this partial whois extract obtained:
Domain Name: DOMAINPROTECTOR.COM.AU
Registrar URL: http://www.terrific.com.au/
Registrar Name: Terrific.com.au Pty Ltd
Status: serverRenewProhibited
Registrant Contact Name: Jonathan Horne
Registrant Contact Email: jonathan@lis.com.au
Name Server: DNS2.STABLETRANSIT.COM
Name Server: DNS1.STABLETRANSIT.COM
Registrant: NJ Ventures Pty Ltd
Registrant ID: ABN 97609870715
Eligibility Type: Company
The above entity used for Domain Protector is also being used by Jonathan Horne to register the domains caught for clients. Doing so is in direct breach of auDA policies where a Registrar and its officers/staff are prohibited to register and own domain names directly. Some exceptions apply to domains used for providing domain registrar services like domainprotector.com.au but not any other domains. Such actions are placing the Melbourne IT registrar accreditation at risk. auDA should review these breaches and take appropriate action.
For someone that is the CEO of Melbourne IT, he is clearly showing disregard to Webcentral / Melbourne IT backorder customers and also for auDA policies. Should Jono Horne step down from the CEO position?
