Experience with Fighting Domain Farming

Lost_my_regs writes "I had a .com domain name relevant only to me, no legal trademark, registered and hosted at a provider that went bust. When attempting to re-host the domain I discovered, to my unpleasant surprise, that the domain is now registered by a domain farming company (name removed). My question is: Is there any way to claim back my domain?"

Comments

In a word, no

[winkydink]

I longer words, if you are prepared to devote vast amounts of your time and effort then there is a very slim chance of your success.

Re:In a word, no

[Anonymous Coward]

If the registrar was ICANN certified, the domain registration should have reverted to ICANN or another ICANN provider when the company went bust. If the company was a subsidiary of another, the registration reverts to the parent. You do not lose the registration, you just get moved to a different registrar (though there can be some period of time while it all gets worked out). Sounds to me like you failed to follow the transfer or failed to pay when it came time to renew. Perhaps your spam filter shitcanned their instructions on how to start using the new registrar.

The relevant ICANN policy

j. Ensure that the registrar's obligations to its customers and to the registry administrator will be fulfilled in the event that the registrar goes out of business, including ensuring that SLD holders will continue to have use of their domain names and that operation of the Internet will not be adversely affected.

SLD is second level domain.

ICANN policy

Re:Buy it

[QuickFox]

So, make it worth their time to continue clogging up the internet? Sadly, as long as pretend-to-do-no-evil giant Google keeps encouraging and rewarding these shady practices, us regular guys are utterly powerless. It would take a tremendous concerted effort to outvote Google with our pitiful dollars.

Even so, I'd try everything I could before resorting to paying the leeches. It's just too distasteful for words.

Process Issues for Registrar Bankruptcies

[NetSettler]

I had a .com domain name relevant only to me, no legal trademark, registered and hosted at a provider that went bust. When attempting to re-host the domain I discovered, ...

This account seems somehow wrong. Did you leave out some material information from the story?

Did this happen to you on a yearly boundary? If not, and if you had a registration on the domain that was good for a year, why couldn't you just go to another domain provider and identify yourself for a transfer? Was the account in good standing? Am I confused, or is this information not a matter of public record that extends beyond the end of your term of registration? Is the registrar at which you bought it the only source of record for such information? That would sound terribly dangerous as a single-point-of-failure for the web in the case of any kind of disaster, much less bankruptcy.

Additionally, did you get no notice? Did you just come in one day and find that your domain no longer responded and that all domains at that registrar were up for grabs? If so, that again seems very weird. I thought a bankruptcy required some court intervention at least for the purpose of asset divvying, and the notion that the registered domains were not an asset that required deliberative action seems odd to me. Possible, certainly--I'm not a lawyer and don't know the process. But odd nevertheless.

Did you act at the moment of the bankruptcy--or did you wait? That is, was your problem the result of the bankruptcy or your failure to act quickly? I realize these issues are probably sad and embarrassing, and I'm not meaning to rub salt in a wound. But Slashdot articles inform people about how the world works, and in exchange for the attention and good advice you offer, I think it's good to offer a complete accounting of the story.

Are you sure you're not leaving out some information? Perhaps the left-out information is not relevant to the question you were asking, but implicit in the question you were asking is alerting people to something that might happen to them. And I'd like to understand better the process by which this could happen to someone else so that we all, as a community, might understand if there's a process issue that needs fixing to assure proactively, rather than reactively, that this shouldn't happen in the future.

Sorry about your problem, btw. Losing a domain happened to a friend of mine by the more usual means of just failing to pay for it for a while. Someone scooped it up and they were left paying a couple hundred dollars to get it back. I agree that's a nuisance, but it does argue for keeping payments up to date on things you care about.

Types of registrars

[Animats]

Domain registrars come in several types:

• ISPs who register domains in their name on your behalf. Many "free domain with hosting" deals are like this. This is strictly for throwaway domains, not for anything serious.
• Resellers of domain registration. These are "affiliates" of actual registrars. Don't use them.
• Accredited ICANN registrars who are primarily domain speculators. There are hundreds of these, most of them false fronts. "enom1.com", "enom2.com", ... "enom471.com" are examples.
• Real registrars, consumer grade Go Daddy is at this level. Low rates, bad service, policies that give the registrar discretionary authority to delete the domain.
• Real registrars, commercial grade A bit more upscale. Network Solutions is at this level. They're good enough for "ibm.com".
• Real registrars, national brand grade MarkMonitor is in this business. They register domains like "google.com" and "ford.com". If anything goes wrong with your domain, alarms go off, and technicians and lawyers descend on the problem. If you have to ask, you can't afford it.

Re:One way to get it back....

[Squalish]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anticybersquatting_Consumer_Protection_Act

If it included her distinctive name and business, the squatter is liable. And regardless, even assuming he wasn't, the squatter would need to contest a subpeona that's likely in a different state, after consulting a lawyer, et cetera, et cetera.

The marginal cost for bulk domains is something like 20-50 cents per year. One lawsuit which costs a thousand dollars to have dismissed costs the squatter thousands of names he could otherwise potentially profit from.