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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?"
Back around 2000, my domain name, www.sideshowfreak.com, was at Netcom, and they somehow managed to drop it in the middle of a back-end transfer. I found out two weeks later when my emails stopped coming.
I did what you suggested, asked nicely, offered to double his transfer expenses, explained that I was setting it up for some friends doing a circus.
He was a total and complete jackass. Hurling obscenities, suggesting unreasonable prices ($100,000). I gave up. It wasn't worth the effort or the agony. I did manage to call his mom, who had the phone number that the account was registered to - the guy was in college and didn't have a phone. The poor woman sounded like she had had this conversation dozens of times. "Please, I don't know why my son is doing this, can you speak to him and ask him to stop, I'm getting so many calls, he's just out of control..." Eventually he anonomized the whois.
That domain name is STILL hosted by a domain name farmer - don't know if it's still him. I expect whoever it is uses some metric of number of hits to determine how valuable a name is, so listing it here might bump up its value.
Domain name farming should be killed. If you're actually using a domain, fine. But if you're just holding it waiting for someone to pay an unreasonably high price, someone with a legit claim (say, the previous owner) should be able to snipe it back.