TDPortCarrier Vetting
StatusDesigned but not yet live. This page describes what the check will do when it ships; the workbench at /vet doesn’t run it today.
The checks

Domain lifecycle

How old is the carrier’s web presence, and was it always theirs?

When live, this check will

Establish the real age and continuity of the carrier's web presence. The check asks two questions: how long has this domain existed in something resembling its current form, and was this domain previously used by a different business. Where the registration record still permits, the check also tries to tie the domain's registrant back to the carrier's named owner.

It's the chameleon-carrier check on the web side. A clean ten- year-old web presence belonging to the carrier is reassuring. A domain registered three weeks ago, or a domain that used to be a chiropractor's office and is now a trucking company, is informative.

Where the data will come from

Two free public sources:

  1. Internet Archive Wayback Machine CDX API for first- archive date and historical content snapshots. Free and unlimited.
  2. Public WHOIS for domain creation date and registrant information when not redacted.

Both are queried live at vetting time, with results cached so re-vetting the same carrier within the TTL window doesn't burn duplicate calls.

What you'll see

  • First Wayback archive date. When the Internet Archive first crawled the domain. A useful proxy for domain age in practice (real businesses tend to get archived early; freshly- spun-up domains haven't been crawled yet).
  • Content history. Whether snapshots from earlier years show the same business or a different one. The check surfaces the top-level signal — consistent / changed industries / sparse history — and links the broker to the Wayback snapshots if they want to look themselves.
  • WHOIS creation date. The official registration date.
  • WHOIS registrant name, when present. Often redacted (see below).

Statuses:

  • Clean — domain is more than a year old, Wayback shows consistent industry presence, no flags.
  • Flag — domain is recent (under a year), or Wayback shows a different business previously at this domain, or the WHOIS creation date is suspiciously close to the FMCSA authority grant date.
  • Alert — domain was created in the last 30 days, or Wayback shows recent active use by a different business abandoned within the last 90 days.
  • Gray — the carrier did not disclose a domain on their MCS-150, or the disclosed domain doesn't resolve.

What this does NOT tell you

  • It does not always tell you who registered the domain. Post-GDPR and post-CCPA, most US small-business domains use registrar privacy proxies. Visible WHOIS registrant on a small carrier's domain is the exception, not the rule — maybe ten to twenty percent of the time. When it's there, it's gold. When it's not, the check downgrades to "no contradiction" on the owner-tie dimension, not "match."
  • It does not verify the domain belongs to the FMCSA-named entity. A carrier could register a fresh-looking domain that matches their FMCSA name; the check confirms the domain's archival history, not its current ownership.
  • It does not detect sophisticated domain reuse — a previously legitimate domain bought from the original owner and rebranded to a new carrier. That pattern is rare and shows up as content changed industries in Wayback if it's recent.
  • It does not check for typosquatting against other carriers' domains. A future improvement.

What to do with the result

Things people commonly weigh:

  • A domain that did not exist before the FMCSA authority grant date is consistent with a newly-formed carrier — neither good nor bad on its own, but worth pairing with the Secretary of State check and the FMCSA chameleon scan.
  • A domain previously used by an unrelated business is the classic chameleon pattern. Combine with the FMCSA chameleon scan finding shared officers or addresses with revoked MCs for the canonical pattern.
  • A clean WHOIS registrant name matching the FMCSA contact name is one of the ten confirmations for the owner corroboration check.
  • An MCS-150 with no disclosed domain is itself unremarkable — many owner-operators don't run a website. It does mean this particular signal is unavailable for that vetting.

Why it matters under Montgomery

Chameleon-carrier patterns appear repeatedly in the negligent- hiring case law that Montgomery freed up to operate. The combination of fresh MC + fresh domain + officers shared with a previously-revoked MC is the textbook fact pattern. The domain check is one leg of catching it before tendering the load.

References