Hi guys,
This is certainly an interesting new change.
First-off, I don't believe this falls under the Distance Selling Regulations:
The Regulations apply to distance contracts. These are contracts:
* for the sale of goods or the provision of services;
* concluded between a supplier and a consumer (note that business to business distance selling is not caught by the Regulations);
* under an organised distance sales or service provision scheme run by the supplier (which will cover, for example, sales made through a call centre or from a web site; but one-off contracts concluded by email are not intended to be caught by the Regulations);
* where the supplier communicates with the consumer without ever coming face to face with the consumer up to and including the moment at which the contract is concluded (i.e. by 'distance communication').
None of this is being done on the parked page, but on the results page.
However, the new regulations pose an interesting question.
The following is the minimum information that must be on any company's website...
Now then, our company's website is
NameDrive.com. It is a US company. On the Out-Law page, it says
A business cannot escape the terms of the Regulations by locating its servers in, say, California. The Regulations look at where a business is based, not where its equipment is based.
The Directive applies to the Member States of the European Economic Area (EEA), which includes the 15 Member States of the EU plus Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein.
The question therefore is posed: Who owns and is running these websites? Is that person acting as a company? You own the domains, we host them, Google puts the ads on. Does the new regulation affect any or all three of these?
My feeling is that, if you as a domainer and domain owner are acting as a company, then you may well be obliged to show this information.
Our larger German users have asked us for some time to place this information on their pages as a separate link at the bottom. In Germany, it is called an Impressum and must appear on every German site.
I will be perfectly honest and say that I am in no way an expert to be consulted on this UK regulation. I was asked for my opinion and this is it. I would be very interested in anyone else's findings / opinions on this matter.
If any of you would like to add a link to this information on your pages we are:
a) Very happy and capable of doing so
b) Adding a new part to the front office (originally for our German customers) where users can upload their own information of this sort without having to go through us.
For now though, contact me and we can get something up for you. I'm in the mountains of Austria till Jan 7th, but they appear to have broadband, so I'll be able to help you out before 1st January 2007.
Hope you all have a great Christmas and New Year.
Ed
