Domain cut throat business

[john_karr]

If a owner forget to re-register his domain name and you backorder it and you get the domain name, and the owner send you a email saying he want it back. What do you do in this cast? do you guys have sympathy for a individual that forgot to re register his domain name and give it back or your mentality is you snooze you lose? You want the name you buy it back. Now im not talking about a trademark name a regular domain name like goat.com for example. Domaining is a cut throat business from what i see in the last 2 yrs in the biz whats your take?

 

[Kenny]

Justin, Is that your thread running on DS?

 

[SpareDomains]

if the domain was used for a cancer center, charity, etc... I would probably give it back for cost or just above cost, if the domain was used for business and the registrar is telling you they had every chance to renew it then I would try to get that in an email or writing and consider my price tag a lesson for them to renew domains on time.

 

[Domagon]

It's not like the domain is cutoff without warning. Even if the owner somehow fails to notice to two or three warnings sent by the registrar before expiration, any website on that domain goes down the day the name expires. If it goes 30 more day it moves to the RGP period. So the original owner has at least 60 days to notice there is a problem.

Often the above is not the case ... each registrar has its own policy on how they handle expired domains.

One can't assume that because a domain resolves it's paid up ... often an expired domain will continue to resolve long after its expiration date.

In addition, from my understanding, RGP, at least in .com, is optional ... not every registrar offers it - even those that do have varying terms, such as the pricing, amount of time, etc.

Bottom line is that it's quite easy for a registrant to lose their domain due to expiration.

On an aside, even a responsible registrant can potentially lose domains due to how expiration dates are calculated / displayed...

Ie. a registrant who checks their domains using a third-party whois may be led to believe the domain expiration date is sometime later than it actually is because there are actually two expiration dates (even many domainers don't know this) in some TLDs, in particular for .com / .net ...

Registry and registrar ... when a .com domain is near or after expiration, another year is typically added on automatically at the registry regardless of its renewal status at the registrar ... so one will often see two different expiration dates for domains that have recently expired. Most registrants don't know this; unaware there are two whois dbs they need to check in some TLDs, such as .com.

With all that said, if a domain appears to have not been actively maintained (ie. few website updates, parked, etc), then my view is they lost it ... tough luck...

However, if the domain was actively being utilized for publicly viewable services (ie. active website) then it depends ... if the domain simply was "pushed" (ie. snapnames or enom drop), then, in my view, the original registrant, at least for a limited period of time, likely has some standing despite it being expired - thus perhaps they should get it back at the cost the new registrant paid, such as the registration / auction price...

On a related note, some "drop" services, in the fine print, indicate the prior registrant may have be able to recover an expired domain that didn't go through a complete "drop cycle" back, for a limited period of time, such as 30 days after it was sold.

But if the domain went through a complete "drop" cycle, including a RGP period, then again, my view is they "lost it".

Ron

 

[ji]

I went to a used bookstore the other day. I purchased a book. In the book the man who owned the store had left me a business card to the shop. It had the domain name, example.com. Only the "com" was crossed out in pen and replaced with "net". I went home and looked on archive.org and the .com had once been the website to the bookstore, but I assume it expired and was reregistered by someone else; the page is now parked. The whois information is all proxy, so the owner could not even be contacted by a common shop-keeper. The man who owns the store is probably in his late fifties or early sixties.

Yes, he let it expire, but why would someone purchase a domain name matching a real life business not belonging to them? Perhaps he thought that since there are no other bookstores of this name, he could let it expire and reregister it when the time was right.

 

[Dave_Z]

"It's not hard to do the right thing, it's just hard to know what the right thing is to do.
Once you know what that right thing is, though, it is very hard not to do it."
-unknown

This quote will forever be etched in my mind. Thanks for sharing that. :D

One thing I've learned in my previous work, as pointed out by two others here,
is to deal with things on a case to case basis. If everything happened exactly
in the same way, there'd likely be little to no problems.

Hmm, someone oughta write an ebook on the subject...

 

[SimpleDomaining]

if domain is his company name i would give it back. but i think i would ask for my backordering money refund from him.

 

[RaiderGirl]

It comes down to how well both parties can negotiate its return, you as a domainer are entitled to earn a profit from your investment, were not in this business to be giving domains away for pennies on the dollar. With that said, I still believe in giving the previous owner a break, 50% of the appraised value is MORE than fair. However these deals usually never come through, because the previous owner refuses to eat that much for his own mistake.

It's like trying to buy concert tickets after they sell out, you had the chance to buy them at $79 each but you waited, now a scalper is offering those same tickets for $500 each. Regret, anger and pride usually follow, making it very difficult to negotiate.

 

[.X.]

This is a circumstance that may happen once in a domainers life time, imo, I would give the name back, That is the ethical thing to do, imo, If they offered me some cash for doing it, I would take it as a thank you. I have learned in life, Don't do something to someone, You wouldn't want to be done to yourself.

In DomainSpades case, The previous owner is using threatining means to try and get thier name back, if this was the case with me, I would keep the name and tell that person to go jump in a lake.

 

[estibot.com]

Yeah Justin, I had a similar experience....threatening with action because I stole their "intellectual property"...

Some people just don't know how to deal with people. If that guy had presented his case politely and made a good case, I would have probably let him have it.

But in Spade's case...the guy is asking for it. Jump in a lake is just about the right response...

 

[-REECE-]

I don't actively hunt expired names anymore, nor have I ever been approached by an owner, but if I was, I'd probably check Archive.org and see what the owner had been up to.

If the owner was a genuine enduser (like the history teacher), I'd give it back free of charge. A few bucks isn't going to do much for me and I'm not the type to punish someone for forgetting to renew their name.

If the original owner was a domainer whom I don't know and was doing nothing with it (like Germany.com) and the name is of high value, I think I'll keep it or better yet, find it a nice home

And if anyone threatened me about suing for their name, etc. Well, they won't be getting their name back at any price...

Respect IMHO should be priceless.

 

[elimam]

I once had a domain that I considered to be valuable. unfortunately for me, it was registred with regfly . i owned the domain for 2 years, during which I received an offer that i rejected. As a "careful" domainer, I renewed the domain before expiration & my credit card was billed as normal.

3 months later, i was trying to update my whois data and obviousily regfly didn't renew my domain and it was registred to the person who had offered to buy it from me. he may have picked it up after it expired.

I didn't go to the new owner crying & asking him to give me my domain name back. simply because it was my mistake to pick the wrong registrar & i wasn't willing to pay anything extra to get it back. more than that, the new owner had done nothing wrong or illegal to acquire the domain name.

and frankly, i expect people who fail to renew their domains to simply go look for another domain name. after all, if it was so valuable to them and to their business they wouldn't have lost it that way.

like in the example of "ji", that bookshop just picked the .net version. i don't think his business is loosing millions of dollars because they lost the com version. a new set of business cards with the new domain name will do just fine.

just my 2 cents.