He has an informal agreement with a informal group of organizations to respect his decision of what records to return in response to DNS requests. No one is obligated to follow that agreement. This form of abuse of that informal agreement should result in the group of organizations unilaterally terminating that agreement.
They would try to alert companies using a domain they didn't own for communications to their customers that this was a bad idea, and soon after got nastygrams from the company's lawyers saying they'd stolen their intellectual property and wiretapped their communications.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2008/03/they_to...
The only real difference in the corp.com case is that instead of just one BigCorp, it's one BigCorp that's gotten a bunch of other SmallCorps and BigCorps to all incorrectly list the same address too.
On the same general note, "a business listed my phone number as theirs and refuses to change it" stories are pretty common, and often have the same "the business refuses to change it" quality.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/08/kansas-couple-su...
It's their house, they can sell it and the associated addresses to whomever they see fit
It’s a legally binding agreement. I guess we should start yanking peoples’ homes because all they have is an “informal agreement” with the seller?
He has some legal agreement with his registrar, and maybe indirectly with ICAAN, but that legal agreement means jack shit to DNS providers, who are the ones that ultimately matter.
For an example of DNS providers already using this fact for the public good, see AdGuard DNS
The fact that a criminal may acquire them and/or use them for nefarious purposes does not mean selling them is a problem.
[1]: https://www.namecheap.com/domains/registration/results.aspx?...
Otherwise, you end up with a world where anyone who comes into possession of a dangerous item is obligated to potentially keep it forever and force all of their descendants to keep it forever.
> O’Connor said he hopes Microsoft Corp. will buy it, but fears they won’t and instead it will get snatched up by someone working with organized cybercriminals or state-funded hacking groups bent on undermining the interests of Western corporations.