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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?"
...kill them, wait two years and reclaim what is yours.
Sue, sue everybody. Sue the now defunct company that lost your domain. Sue the company that bought your domain. Sue the owners of said companies directly. Sue their parents, their wives, and their children. Sue their pets. Sue everybody!
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
The domain now has no value to another as they cannot use or sell it without violating the trademark. You also have a much stronger position in the various appeal processes.
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
SLD is second level domain.
ICANN policy
I would say start lowering it. They come back with $5,000: come back with $50.
Those people are out for easy money. Easy money should be peanuts or less.
Be prepared to walk so that they'll lose and they'll lose because the domain name is only good to the person who's responsible for this article. Meaning, after they're registration time is up, they'll abandon it themselves. Paying them is to only get it back sooner.
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
Even so, I'd try everything I could before resorting to paying the leeches. It's just too distasteful for words.
Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
Wait. Don't contact them. Don't make any waves.
Often - very often - a domain farmer picks up the domain for just a week or so (no matter how long the WHOIS says it's really registered for) - and waits to see if the pay-per-click ads generate enough revenue to make it worth keeping. So often the best thing you can do is...nothing. Don't visit the site (generates traffic), don't contact them (tells them they have a chance of milking you for $), don't do anything - just sit and wait. Often the name will get dropped and another farmer will pick it up immediately - but if you're patient and check back in with the WHOIS, you should eventually see it free again for long enough to grab it.
This may sound ridiculous, but it's how the domain name economy is currently working, courtesy of weak ICAAN rules. Make it work in your favor - you want that one name, but they want 100,000 that generate enough revenue to make up the low ($3.50/year? can't remember) ICAAN fees necessary to hold on to it. (They know WIPO arbitration is going to cost you $1500+legal fees, so in that route the numbers are on their side.)
This has worked with the .com versions of two different domain names held by non-profit clients of mine just this year. Good luck.
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.
WTF? Domain-squatting should be eliminated, and it's perfectly reasonable to expect there to be a process by which a case of domain-squatting can be resolved properly.
Take GoDaddy.com, a domain registrar who fairly often blackmails their customers for hundreds of dollars on domains they keep that should have been allowed to expire and been available publicly again. ICANN should warn them, and revoke their license if they continue in anti-trust behavior. It shouldn't be allowed in the first place, I'm saying, and ICANN should make sure it doesn't happen secondly.
Of course 'the market' should stop going to GoDaddy and thus 'the market' should decide, but that shouldn't prevent ICANN from implementing something effective to stop problems at the source.
Registrars in the habit of making you check a box agreeing to a service arrangement with a clause basically giving them power of attorney 'on your behalf' should find in court that such a clause, at least, is void. Likewise, GoDaddy's clause that they will keep a domain you do not renew 'on your behalf' but ask for exorbitant fees for doing so should been seen for what it is.
And if GoDaddy was forced to release expired domains back into the public pool there would still be this problem of domain snipers picking up the domain from the public pool to do that same exact thing. Just because someone else will do it doesn't mean GoDaddy should be allowed to. I do wonder how one could demonstrate that domain squatting is what is occurring without squatters finding a loop-hole or way to appear legit, or otherwise what rule would help solve this problem, but that doesn't mean none exist.
You YELL that we don't need more rules and regulations, but the majority of domains registered today are squatted hoping to make money on advertising from inadvertent visitors or selling the domain to someone who wants to use it, actually, for real. This is a shit-situation that should be counter-acted.
If you let your domain expire, it should go back to being available to the public. The fact that it doesn't go back into the public pool makes me sick, and more-over hurts the public while being illegit. Half of the domains I want to register have place-holder pages as they wait to ask hundreds of percent of the registration cost for the domains use. That fact indicates their is something broken with the domain name marketing system.
The stock markets may be much more detrimental and there are probably some larger issues there, but they do occasionally convict for insider trading, and ICANN should take a tip from that and not allow domain sniping. If you know that someone is potentially interested in a domain available to the public and you go and register that name in order to get that person or entity to buy it from you, that's wrong and should be illegal. What reason do you have for saying we shouldn't have a process for resolving the illegitimacy of that action?
As for all the squatters betting on domain names that have general appeal, it's true that this is just as illegitimate, but at least it doesn't target individual persons or entities. I'm not convinced that you should be able to hold on to a domain name (reserve it) for longer than a year without having a particular use for it. This is a less black-and-white situation though.
It's true that we've heard horror stories from the days of supposed trademark holders taking away legit domains from legitimate domain holders - let's learn for those lessons, and from lessons of today, and create namespaces (fix the ones we've got) that have more common sense and repel more detrimental registrations...