Comment by ocdtrekkie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ocdtrekkie | Hacker News Reader

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The reason squatters work is in fact, the dispute resolution cost. A friend of mine passed away, and along with him went control of the domain of a site I was a part of. He had, prior to his death, left a note that me and another friend were supposed to keep the site running. And I own two of the other TLDs of this domain.

Domain squatting is supposedly against ICANN rules, and we have a clear brand we're trying to protect.

So when it was squatted, and listed for somewhere around $1,000, I figured this was an open and shut case with ICANN. Until I found out that filing a dispute would cost me even more. Dispute resolution seems to be offered up to a couple of different organizations, all of which charge exorbitant rates to examine your case.

So squatters have a massive range of profit margin they can make, as long as they keep the prices under the ICANN dispute resolution costs.

When you mean "squatted" - you mean that you (or someone) let the domain expire and forgot the registration fee.

That's not "squatting" or stealing. You just forgot to renew it or have a backup card on file or transfer the domain after his death.

You make it sound like someone came in and stole it when the onus is technically on you to maintain control of this domain. You can register a domain for multiple years if the domain is important in case of an unexpected accident (or death).

Unfortunately, yes, we lost control of the domain because nobody was able to secure a renewal for it. The problem is that after that, it was sold to a third party, not the registrar, who listed it for an exorbitant price. They have no interest in the domain other than selling it to us, and it has little to no value to anyone else.

There should be an easy way through which you can complain against the squatters online. Maybe Google should act as a mediator here as they can blacklist any domain from their searches and thus hold about as much power as the registrars/ICANN.

In any case, what happened afterwards? Did you get back your domain or is it still being squatted?

It's still being squatted. I own other TLDs for it we can operate the site off of. I'm hoping eventually they abandon the domain, since it's unlikely anyone else will want it.

Did you try complaining to ICANN about it via any means? An alternative is to throw a DMCA on them through Google, that's much faster (though its intended use is reporting of copyright violations, not sure how it'll work for reporting of squatting of domain names).

ICANN wants you to file a dispute. Filing a dispute costs more than paying the squatter.

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