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What Should Happen To Expired Domains?
A good example of why expired domains should be allowed back into the pool comes in the form of another question from Jonathan Mendelson: "I was recently searching to see if mendelson.net was available, and it surprised me to see that Network Solutions was holding it. I used the whois function to find out more, and I saw that their record expired on Nov. 14, 1999. This makes it appear that they are holding the domain illegally. Are they allowed to do this, and if not, is there any action that I can take to prevent them doing so? Is there any particular reason that they might be holding it, and might there be other domains with which they are doing the same?"
Of course, an answer (in the form of another question, obviously) might be found in this bit from conf00sledBynsi who asks:
"There is a domain name I am interested in, which is not being used. It was originally registered in March of 1988, and has not been reregistered, so it has 'lapsed' for over three months, but Network Solutions has not released it for re-registration yet. After a couple of emails to Network Solutions, I received the following reply:
---------------------Does anybody know how long their 'billing cycle' is, or what their algorithm is for determining when to release a domain name? For that matter, has anybody figured out their algorithm for when, exactly, during a particular day the database is updated?"Thank you for contacting Network Solutions.
The expiration date that shows in WHOIS is not the date that a domain name becomes available to be registered by another party.
The expiration date appears in the WHOIS database so that the registrant may be able to verify how long they have locked in there domain name registration.
The registrant still has until the end of the billing cycle before the domain name is deleted, and released to be registered by the public.
We do not release the date a domain name will be deleted from our database to third parties. Please continue to check the availability of the domain name on a day to day basis. As long as it is registered our system will not allow you to register the name. Once it is deleted, the name is able to be registered on a first come first serve basis.
There are no waiting list for domain name registrations.
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Could it be, that by arbitrarily defining their "billing cycle" NSI is able to hold on to domains that have been expired for years. I would think that your normal business cycle is measured in months so this seems rather fishy to me. Might NSI be squatting on their own domains?
As I understand it, it's not a matter of 'replacing' NSI, it's a matter of only doing business with the competing registrars as a protest to NSI's monopolistic practices.
Network Solutions is abusing their unique position of power, first by claiming to own all domain names, and second by this fiasco.
"DOJ, you've just gotten MS ordered broken up. How are you going to celebrate?"
"I'm going to Disneyland, then I'm cracking heads at Network Solutions!"
ever since they lost their monopoly, they have had the petulant attitude of a child deprived of a favorite toy. nsi needs to drop the bad attitude and focus on getting customers through superior service and cost. i suppose it can be hard to compete with the likes of joker, who offers ~$12usd registration for a year, versus $35 - $85 to nsi.
also, has anyone noticed that nsi seems to be giving themselves a rather large amount of domains? they have netsol.com, netsol.org, networksoutions.com, networksolutions.org, networksolutions.net, nsi.com, nsi.net, networksol.com, and netsolution.org - and that's just the ones i can think up off hand.
i will never give a dime to nsi.
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Cybersqutting is usually meant to mean buying a domain that you do not intend to use, to sting money out of people who will later want that name. This is more like cyber-real-estate-speculation.
Squatting is when you make use of a property that you don't own, but that the owner isn't using. If people are going to register names, then leave them unused so they expire like this, then is it possible to start squatting in the domain?
I guess squatting involves:
An organization I work for had its web designer and maintainer recently go out of business. The defunct business arbitrarily placed the organization's website with a new third party host and vanished. After the group committed thousands of dollars to build a new website, I checked Whois to determine who was hosting their existing site. I was shocked to learn that their domain registration had expired 26 days earlier. I immediately called Network Solutions and, much to my relief, was told that there was a 30 day grace period on expirations. Without any assurance of being reimbursed, I took the responsibility to renew the registration for ten years--and was glad for the opportunity to do so!
If I wrote the rules, I would give the original owner of the domain name a reasonable fixed period of time, say, 90 days, to renew. After that, the name would go back up for grabs. Actually, that's probably more than enough time for the owner to cough up more dough.
Why not release them immediately? It's one thing for someone other than Joe Domain to snap up www.joedomainname.com immediately after Joe Domain lets his renewal slip. But a couple of months ago we had an incident...we host most of our sites with a certain hosting company who shall remain nameless. One client's domain name up and ceased to work one day. The client had paid us, we had paid the nameless hosting company...but the nameless hosting company had forgotten to pay NetSol, and this client had competitors who were dying to get their grubby little paws on his domain name. If that name had been released into the wild again right after it expired, there could have been a hell of a mess for us to clean up. So a reasonable delay, then, is good. Holding a domain name for a year or more is ridiculous. If Joe Domain hasn't renewed his name by then, NetSol oughta realize that he probably never will.
This is a Chao. A Chao says "Mu."
*sigh*...this is just another example of nsi acting irresponsibly without regard to the public they are (should be) serving.
Back when I used them, I found that changing an IP for a name server was much harder than it should be (their systems will respond months later, sometimes never, even when simply responding that there has been an error in the 'automated' processing). Trying to find a phone number to call was quite hellish, and it took much searching through their site (cleverly designed not to let people find their number easily). Oh, yes, and it wasn't an 800 number either. Calling it, I'm immediatly put on hold for 45 minutes, only to talk to someone who claims 'I cannot help you, please call this number....'). I ask to speak to the supervisor, and here's what I find amazing -- he refuses! I ask him for his name - he refuses again, this time claiming he already told it to me!
Amazing...just...amazing....
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grep "xercist"
"The expiration date appears in the WHOIS database so that the registrant may be able to verify how long they have locked in there domain name registration."
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grep "xercist"
However this does not fully explain the results from this question. This policy above has only happened within the last month, but as others have pointed out on the thread, there are domains expired as far back as Feb.
IANAL, but there's an interesting case here to watch for that could bring contract violation charges onto NSI. If, as suggested, they take those domains into their public auction but AFTER they changed the contract, would this not be violating that? It's understandable if you fall a day or two behind, but NSI is claiming they're months behind. If they are that far behind then they are being inefficient adn should lose their gov't contract by the same point. (And from my recent experience with other registers, the case appears isolated at NSI).
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
About Network Solutions... they're anything but even handed or consistant. Of course, in the past, they HAVE let expired domains go back into the public pool and be re-registered by another person. (Take "police.net"... that was a customer at an ISP I worked for that let their domain name drop.) I know of many others. I also remember years ago they're harassing us and denying us a registration for "bingo.net", even though it was not taken at all! They would not let us register it!
Anyone who has had a great number of dealing with NetSol will have some war stories. This is definately a case where I'm going to vote with my dollars. I encourage others to do the same.
What about a distributed search engine type of approach?
.com, and then the servers that new .com would know who knew about .microsoft.com, and then that server or servers would know about support.microsoft.com.
Let's see, how would that work.
First, you'd have to have some way of knowing where to start searching. Say, a file listing the sites that knew the further info. There could be several of them, say 13 of them for redundancy.
Then, you'd need a standard protocol for talking to them.
You could type a name into a search tool, and it'd use that standard protocol to go get the information.
Each of those sites would have enough information to know where to go for the next part.
You could break it up by words; so that, for instance, all of the 13 core servers would know where to go for information about
That would let you have as little or as much redundancy at each stage as you cared to.
Then you would have to fully document that standard according to currently-accepted Internet documentation standards.
Would that do the trick?
(serious mode on)
We already have a distributed search engine approach to DNS. It has to be deterministic, however; you don't want somebody typing the address you gave them on your business card and getting your competitor's page.
Or, worse; sending email to your email address and having it go to somebody else.
"Here's your password for online ordering using your credit; we're sending it to what our search engine says is your address. Order away!"
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I think domain names have a good use. Distributed approaches lose accountability (ie how do you convince someone that you are the 'official' site for something?). Also, you need a consistent way to lead people to your site-- search engines will return multiple possibilities rather than the specific site you want people to go to.
But as the guy who wants to burn all TLDs , I do agree that we need to move to a more elegant system for universal addressing (I favor, basically, the idea of having everything being a TLD-- so unless you are a gov site or edu site, your TLD is your domain name). Ultimately, there will need to be addresses, and with those will go trademark and property issues.
What disappoints me about this NSI thing is that it is such pathetic customer service. Their draconian agreement, high price and poor service is going to screw them sooner or later-- we can just register with companies which are more on the ball. In the long run, companies which don't produce a useful product get swept aside. Legal sneaky games and clever tricks might help you a little on the margin, but you can't build your business on it. Unless you are a trial lawyer. But I digress....
As shown in a previous message, "icy.hot" is one of the domain names that have expired back in February, yet is still unavailable for re-registration. Here are the revelant parts of the WHOIS information:
Domain Name: ICY.COM
Record last updated on 08-Mar-1999.
Record expires on 15-Feb-2000.
Record created on 14-Feb-1996.
Database last updated on 7-Jul-2000 16:34:07 EDT.
Go to Network Solution's Home Page and try to register "icy.com". You can't. Netsol says "Sorry, icy.com is not available.". Fair enough. So, I've decided that on behalf of the owner of icy.com, I'm going to pay his bill. So I go to the NSI Online Payment System. I enter "icy.com" as the domain I want to make a payment on. Here's the response I get:
Related information could not be retrieved for the domain. This could be because:
1.The top level domain is not a com, net, or org.
2.An invoice number could not be created for this domain.
3. The invoice number given does not match with that in the database.
Well, it isn't #1, and it isn't #2. It certainly isn't #3 because I did a lookup by the domain name, not the invoice number. And if I enter a domain name that completely doesn't exist, I get a different error:
Related information could not be retrieved for the domain. This could be because:
1.The domain information has not yet been processed or updated into the database.
2.You entered an incorrect domain name.
So, the domain name can't be registered. Okay. The domain name can't be renewed either. (Netsol *might* try to claim that they can do it with an invoice number -- but COME ON. Why would it be blocked in their automated payment system? I'm sure they'll have a good lie for this one.)
Network Solutions is making up the rules as they go along, and they need to have their feet held to the fire and be accountable for their actions. Someone ought to sue them over this.