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NetSol To Do Domain Name Auctions
Here's an "official" email I've gotten.
****************************************
Domain Name: XXXXX.COM
****************************************
Creation Date: 03/28/2000
****************************************
June 22, 2000
Kohn Doe
XXXXXXXX@cfl.rr.com
Important Message Regarding a Modification to
Your Domain Name Registration Service Agreement
------------------------------------------------
Dear Customer,
Network Solutions' records indicate that you
are the Administrative Contact for the domain name
listed above, but we have not yet received payment for
our services, as your agreement with us requires. We
have already sent two notices to the registrant's
billing contact and have deactivated, but not deleted,
your registration. We are now modifying your agreement
to provide you with three options to satisfy your
payment obligation and avoid collection agency action.
The options are:
1. PAY: Pay in full by June 28, 2000 at: http://payment.networksolutions.com/go/tind/payments/ Upon payment in full, the registrant will enjoy the balance of their term of service and full rights to their domain name under the agreement. PLEASE DO NOT SEND A CHECK. Payment must be made online.
2. DELETE: reply to this email by June 28, 2000, instructing us to delete your Name immediately and we will do so. You will still be liable for payment in full and may be subject to collection agency action.
3. AUCTION: if you do not PAY or DELETE as above by June 28, 2000, we will enter the domain name in Network Solutions' new auction site in an attempt to satisfy the registrant's payment obligation. Any and all proceeds that we receive from the transfer of your domain name registration (up to the full registration fee) will be retained by Network Solutions and your domain name will be transferred to the successful bidder. By selecting this option, you hereby authorize us to act as your contact to perform all necessary actions relating to the auction and transfer of your domain name registration.
If this domain name account lists your hosting provider as the billing contact, please contact them directly. For others, please call our customer service at 1-800-779-1710 from the United States and Canada. Outside of these areas, call (703) 742-4777 Monday - Friday from 7:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. We hope this modification to your agreement is helpful to you.
Regards,
Network Solutions(R)
A VeriSign(R) Company
It's disturbing considering that NSI doesn't exactly have a history of keeping their paperwork straight. How many times have they transferred someone's domain after simply recieving an e-mail from a hijacker? How long after this policy is implemented until someone forget's to mark my domain as paid after recieving my check, and my domain is auctioned off? How many notification e-mails will they forget to mail off?
On a side note: I fail to see how auctioning off a domain name will hurt anyone but individuals or small businesses. Do you actually think if some Big Company with a recognizable name would let their registration expire, and their domain was auctioned off, that whoever bought it would be allowed to keep it? No, said Big Company would simply sue the pants off of the buyer for "copyright infringement" or something.
Every time I see a story like this, I see a little bit more of the Internet slowly swallowed up by the machine that is Corporate America(World). PETA get's back peta.org. Coca-Cola shuts down some fan-site. Fox goes headhunting Simpson fan sites. I know that some of this is inevitable with the growth of the internet, but it's still disappointing to see coroporations take over another thing in this world.
Hey, Rocky! Watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat!
jhk asks:
Does that mean, according to the most recent legal arguments about intellectual property, that NSI is in violation of IP law for owning someone else's trademarks?
Not per se. At this time the "property" status of domain names is still unclear. While there was a string of decisions through 1999 that supported the domain-holder-owns-it theory, two decisions this spring instead supported the domain-as-product-of-contract theory. In other words, it only exists as a product of a valid contract between you and the domain registrar.
Could a company like Microsoft sue NSI for trademark infringement and demand ownership of the name microsoft.com, which would necessitate direct access to the root nameservers?
Under current ICANN policy, and recent court decisions, registrars are pretty much wholly indemnified, unless they themselves do something intentional against a domain-holder. Essentially, this is to get registrars (NSI, joker.com, anybody) out of the middle of lawsuits between trademark/domain disputants, but it also has the effect of holding them essentially blameless in cybersquatting or domain-hijacking cases (cf. recent decision in sex.com case).
----
lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
Look at that peta decision. Lets say I buy one of these domains at auction. NetSol gets my cash. The former owner sues me because he has a copyright on that domain and a judge forces me to give it to him. So I just lost whatever I paid to buy it at auction, my fee to NetSol, AND however much I paid content creators for their work.
No fucking thanks.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
This seems to me to be a pretty logical idea (although I'd prefer they just kick the domain name back out into freespace instead of auctioning it off.)
If you aren't paying for a domain, why should you be allowed to hang onto it?
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
Hey, I hate to say it, but if you wanna play, you gotta pay. I know that I don't like working and not getting paid for it. They are merely trying to press users to pay for what they have, and are repossessing just like everyone else does. I know that if I was running a webhosting firm, and you didn't pay me for a year, and ran up a huge debt, that I'd take off your website and sue you for the losses. This is a relatively minor action on their part by means of what they legally COULD do, they're actually being fairly civil about this, despite the flack that they will surely take in the threads of this article.
Eh...
Nice move on their part. Let's imagine- what happens when something like hotmail.com goes unpaid (which has happened before?) That's right... instead of getting 35$ (or whatever NSI is charging during this phase of the moon) when someone realizes their mistake, now NSI gets to extort the new owner for however much they feel like. Note that the notice doesn't say what happens to the money above and beyond what is owed... think that it disappears? I doubt it. It'll go straight into NSI's pockets. For most names that will expire, this isn't a big deal- at most they'll clear only a slight amount above what they are owed. But for names that expire and are highly in demand, this gets NSI a huge return. Nothing illegal in it, I guess... but it reeks just the same.
~luge
IAAL,BIANLY
I think alot of people are missing the point here. It's not really about the previous owners rights, if they didn't pay for it then yes they don't deserve to own the domain. It's about the fact that NSI is trying to hold onto it's monopoly by NOT letting domains out of it's system. Alot of the money Registrars make is from people regging domains that drop from NSI. This move if it goes through could seriously damage the domain free market as users no longer have a choice of registrars. The only way to change registrars is to pay NSI!
Also, wasn't it NSI that claimed that domains were not property so they wouldn't be liable for hijacks? They're not making sense because by holding these auctions they are making it clear that domains ARE property and contradicting themselves.
If you don't pay for your domain you should lose it we can all agree. However somehow not truly connected but somewhat on the same thread is the whole PETA dispute. I love tasty animals too, especially that bit of a chicken I ate for lunch. What is to keep big corporate enterprises from not paying and then suing you when you register the domain they let lapse? Register with joker.com. Joker is a reseller for Core. The interesting thing about Core is, if you follow the link and look at the bottom of the page, that they are based in Switzerland. The Swiss seem to be less stupid about such things than these US people are. So if they try to drag you into court over it, your domain is registered internationally. Lawyers, politicians, and other such people(?) seem to be infatuated with physical jurisdiction. Let them know that they can talk to you in international court.
Well perfect, now I guess it'll be auctioned off "to recover collection fees?" That's ridiculous. It sounds like you enter a lifelong committment to continually renew your domain or else face foreclosure or something.
As far as the one I've been watching, I guess it'll just go on the auction block. Cripes...
Next thing they'll probably do is modify the CGI script on their home page that let's you "check domain availability" and then roll it right into a new auction so all new domains are instantly an auctionable item too... :(
I got an email a few minutes ago from NSI saying basically the same thing, that a domain name I was listed as a contact for (not billing contact) was going to be auctioned off, and that collection proceeding would be brought against me.
Since I don't work for the company in question I fired off a reply telling them so. However, knowing NSI's notorious lack of ethics, I wouldn't be surprised to see my credit rating impacted regardless. Won't make any difference -- I don't pay former employer's bills and they will get nothing from me.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
This seems to be a pretty standard practice in the real world... auctioning off a foreclosed home, or repossesed car... granted that they're doing things fairly quickly... that's hardly even enough time to get in touch with anybody regarding reposession of a domain name...
It'd just be nice to see one of the bigwigs get nailed with this... Seeing Microsoft lose www.microsoft.com would be funny... of course, even if you won the auction, you couldn't really do anything with it, because of recent laws and court decisions against cyber squatting and trademark infringment... that could be an interesting scenario...
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
Perhaps NSI should be made accountable for this kind of stupidity. I can't imagine not getting an encryped password from NSI. I can't imagine NSI not requiring confirmation on domain name changes. They've even admitted that this thing has happened before.
I don't speak for my employer, of course, but I'd think twice about renewing my domain through NSI without some kind of insurance against this kind of thing.
Yes, I'm a little perterbed about it. No, it doesn't effect me personally. Yet.
Jeff
JHK
http://www.cascap.org and stop on by for a latte, huh?
Uhh, that's not how I read it.
Three e-mails to two addresses AFTER you've forgotten to pay the bill sounds like a reasonable attempt to contact the domain holder.
--
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
...and has the same solution.
Refuse to use their products & services. I recently registered a second domain with a different registrar. They're cheaper, have a much easier to use administration setup, and you can actually talk to them on phone if you have a question. They even made transferrring my current domain from NSI easy & painless.
NSI has never had to think about customer service before, and they are apparently completely incapable of even understanding the concept - as a result, the new registrars that do understand it are going to (hopefully) bury them.
This is the reason Internic changed its registration agreements to say that it owns all domains. That way it can auction the domains in the event that you don't pay registrar fees instead of returning it to the public domain. I call it theft pure and simple. How can companies like PETA claim to own the rights to PETA.org and have a it upheld in court and then Internic can auction off someone else's Domain/Trademark to the highest bidder?