I was registering a domain yesterday and I decided to have a look at register.com’s Service Agreement. Halfway down the page I found this:

You acknowledge and agree that Register.com may suspend, cancel, transfer or modify your use of the Services at any time, for any reason, in Register.com’s sole discretion and without notice to you.

So, they can just take your domain name from you at anytime. Your whole business is in their hands. Doesn’t this seem a bit intrusive?

I went to Network Solutions and read theirs as well. They don’t have such a clause, as far as I could tell. They give themselves a 30 day period after you register a domain, during which they can cancel it. And they list a handful of legitimate reasons for service termination after 30 days. Needless to say I ended up with Network Solutions.

But it got me thinking. Someone needs to take the lead of Creative Commons and create human-readable summaries of service agreements, so people can readily asses the legal burden of a service agreement. I think clear summaries, highlighting differences between competitors, could really help hold these companies accountable for heavily lopsided service agreements.