Patent for rating domain registrars — Symantec issued

Does your registrars’ reputation matter?

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has granted patent number 9,130,962 (pdf) to Symantec for “Calculating Domain Registrar Reputation by Analysis of Hosted Domains”.

Symantec, which sells the web security product line Norton, suggests that calculating a registrar reputation score helps determine how much scrutiny to give to websites connected to domain names at that registrar.

If a registrar has a high proportion of names distributing malware, responsible for spam, or that contain typos, a security service can add a higher level of scrutiny to the site ahead of allowing service users to visit it. Certain types of bad sites could have a higher weight in the calculation than others.

While reading the patent, it seems that “web host” might be interchangeable with “registrar”. Either way, it suggests that registering domain names and hosting them with registrars with better records could be beneficial.

Symantec applied for the patent back in 2008.