Domain Name News

Richard Lau Purchases iWhois.com from Andrew Moulden

Posted: 24 Jan 2011 11:39 AM PST

When iWhois.com had a sudden change in its interface at the end of last week, many of its loyal users were surprised. DNN dug deeper and found out that there was also an ownership change behind the scene. The sales price has not been disclosed.

The new owner, industry veteran Richard Lau (who also is co-owner of the DomainName.com registrar) has added some new features to the site as well, allowing users to directly query domain related information at sites like Alexa, Compete.com and many more. Lau told DNN “As an avid and loyal user of iwhois.com for many years, I am extremely proud to carry the mantle as the new owner of iwhois.com.”

Andrew Moulden had established iWhois.com in December of 2004 with the aim to provide a secure way of looking up domain names – the site quickly gained popularity after it was mentioned on a private forum and many of its early users (including the author of this article) have remained loyal to the site. While the method of lookup has now been changed to use the DomainTools whois API, the site will remain free of any front running activities. Richard Lau also is a member of the advisory board to DomainTools. As Moulden told DNN, “it was a condition of sale that there would be no front running.”

The current trust policy states:

We do not monitor searched domains at iWhois that are available for registration.
We never access or extract such data from our server logfiles. These are emptied daily.

Lau added: “I have been running registrars since 2000 and have never engaged or enabled front-running and renew iwhois.com’s commitment to no front-running whatsoever.”

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