It always somewhat bugged me they used an actual domain for this, was there no other alternative like using a fake TLD? I'm not sure of what a router is entirely capable of doing, but if you could filter a request to "configure.tplink" or something that would make it far less likely to hijack the domain, that and the fact the domain didn't always work every time I would try it... or I couldn't remember it at times.
You don't need a TLD at all... They added .com to make it more approachable to users (presumably)
Why is that an issue? Owning the domain is the correct thing to do. They just screwed up by losing ownership of it.
Owning the domain isn't my issue, using one that doesn't always work is my issue. They could of used a hostname or something else that the router picks up?
The most incredibly stupid thing about this is that the router needs at least one IP address to be hard-coded into it anyway, if for nothing else than to be a pointer to the root DNS server. So TP-Link gains absolutely nothing by re-directing through DNS. The only difference between having a hard-coded IP pointing to a TP-Link server and a hard-coded IP pointing to a public DNS server is that TP-Link doesn't control the public DNS server. So this was already a stupid design decision even before they lost the domain.