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What to Do When Your ISP Steals Your Domain?
sahonen asks: "Some web hosting providers also provide domain registration on the side, which is great for users who want to keep things simple. What ends up happening, though, is the user will want to switch hosting providers, but their old host will hold on to the domain to try and lock the user in. I've seen this happen many times and it's not pretty. This happened to a friend of mine just recently and he's asking me for advice. I don't want him to have to buy another domain when he's worked so hard to establish his old one. Aren't domains legal property (we are in the US here)? Can he nail the old host for cybersquatting? And for the philosophers, how do these hosts expect to maintain a good reputation when they engage in such unscrupulous business practices?"
Q: What to do when someone steals your domain?
A: Slashdot Them!
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If that is the case, then you don't have a domain squatter. You have theft through deception. Take them to court.
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
I checked the legal garbage at (http://www.olm.net/standardpolicies.html) and there doesn't seem to be any provision about OLM.net keeping domain name rights. Hit them with a complaint, and file complaints with the Better Business Bureau, etc. By the way, since your friend's site seems to be /.'ed, the Service Agreement here (http://www.olm.net/sla.html) says your friend is due some refund because his site is down....
I was involved in a somewhat related situation. Here's what happened:
I used to work for a software company. I registered a domain for that software company through register.com and *MY* name was on the domain registration. I never actually transferred ownership to that software company, but leased the domain to them under a verbal arrangment. Their website was handled by XO and the domain registration was still handled by register.com
Software company gets acquired, and the new owner doesn't want to use the domain. Instead, appoints some scumbag to try to auction it off. Only problem, of course, is that the domain is still owned by me, and it was never theirs to sell.
Scumbag decides he wants control of the domain and sends a threatening lawyer-writ letter to both XO and register.com. XO AND register.com decide that the whole UDRP thing is just too complicated and simply lock me out of the website, my POP account, my register.com domain management account, and everything else related to that domain. Unbelievable. Take my credit card off the account, basically pretened that I don't exist anymore -- EVEN THOUGH my name was on the account, I was paying for the hosting, paid for registration, etc. I called, yelled, screamed, etc. Neither company cared...they just caved to the most scary-sounding letter and "wanted to avoid trouble". Scumbag thought he won.
So what did I do? Transferred the domain to new registrar (domainmonger.com -- very cool guys who actually respect the UDRP). Luckily, the automated register.com system let that happen, and all of a sudden, the domain was back in my (rightful) hands. Lots of people got pissed off when all of a sudden they realized that many lawyerletters had changed hands (and money was spent) and they had nothing to show for it. Tried the same approach with domainmonger, and got a simple "please refer to the UDRP if you wish to dispute ownership of this domain" right back in their faces. Upon realizing that a dispute takes time and money, they quietly shut up and went away.
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If you surf down to Score:1 (or visit http://slashdot.org/~sahonen and surf his replies ) you'll find the following:
"Dan Cervantes is the owner of the Big Boy Drum company. The problem is that the ISP won't let him transfer the DNS to the server he wants to move his web site to, actually a web host I run. No, I won't plug it, 'cause we're near our bandwidth limit already."
Since when has a ISP had any control over DNS changes? Why even talk to them about it? Go directly to http://www.corenic.org/ and move the damn thing yourself.
"As much as a refund would be nice, the site was down before it got linked to on slashdot, I think the ISP took it down when Dan cancelled his hosting. But they kept the domain name."
They don't have the domain name. Whois clearly says that Dan does. It sounds to me that you simply don't understand the difference between an ISP and a DNS.
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