ICANN's 2025 Policy Shift Makes Client Domain Ownership a Legal Requirement
Web agencies should never hold legal ownership of a client's domain name, a principle now reinforced by ICANN's updated Registration Data Policy, which took full effect on August 21, 2025. Under the new rules, the entity listed in a domain's Organization field is treated as the legal Registered Name Holder, overriding any informal ownership arrangements. Agencies that register domains under their own accounts face serious risks, including single-point-of-failure outages and potential trademark dispute liability as the named registrant. Best practice requires agencies to verify that each client's exact legal business name appears in the Organization field during onboarding. The stakes are heightened further by ICANN's first new top-level-domain application window since 2012, open from April 30 to August 12, 2026, making accurate, client-owned registrant records more consequential than ever.
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