As Many as 5K .Com’s Taken Away by Sealed Court Order by Verisign
thedomains.com
thedomains.com
You know who I feel bad for though? Those people who originally registered big corporate brands .COM in the 90s and had their domains ripped from them. That shit is ICANN endorsed nowadays.
That depends - are they really a competitor in the same industry, and their use of your trademark leads to confusion in the marketplace? Because then you're not out of luck at all, you have a trademark case.
DNS is not private land; it's a system in which the existence of a TLD is dependent on the widespread agreement to grant registrar(s) the right to administer it. Movement away from reasonable and non-discriminatory behavior is an attempt to secure undue control over a system that exists only because of the participation of the internet community at large.
Of course, given the massive growth in internet consumers and the general impossibility of their all being educated (much less having a voice in these sorts of decision), this sort of abusive behavior is quickly becoming par for the course on today's internet.
A domain is free to register. You register it as per your registrars normal procedure. In some faraway country (say the USA) a bankruptcy court decided that this domain that you just registered was part of the original holdings of the company in bankruptcy.
Even though the company (or the receivers) let the registration lapse (presumably because they were not doing too well financially).
And so the court will order that domain that you just paid for to be assigned to some third party.
That's pretty perverted.
If there was an unbroken chain of ownership from the moment the original company registered it to the point where the domain was levied during the bankruptcy proceedings I can see the logic of it, but once the company and/or the receivers let the domain lapse they technically forfeited it and a judge should not cooperate with them to reverse agreements between two other consenting parties (you and the registrar) in order to re-assign that domain to the pile of assets in the bankruptcy, especially not 'ex parte' (so without hearing either you or the registrar as to how you came into possession of that domain).
Otherwise from now on there is no such thing as a 'lapsed domain' any more. And in fact, domains would not longer be 'property'. (I don't think they're property to begin with and this case is a nice example of why I think they aren't even though everybody treats them as such.)
And the order isn't against the new owner - so it sounds invalid to me? Not a lawyer, but Verisign should at least have questioned these. I have no idea if they'd have a claim, or what kind of claim, or who to.
The problem here is actually with VeriSign. Any time you transfer an asset to an entity but retain the right to get it back under certain conditions, you have to think through what will happen if that other party enters into bankruptcy and those assets get sucked into the proceeding. It's wrong for them to assume they can resell the domain name the second it lapses.
Probably a deal gone bad and the person convinced a judge that if it went through normal channels the persons owning the domains would liquidate them. That or the transfer was deemed illegal in the first place.
A quick google for Robert Olea reveals he is a domain broker.
[1] http://www.noip.com/blog/2014/07/10/microsoft-takedown-detai...
No details about the settlement were released but No-IP certainly got paid.
Who care how many innocent people are victimized in the process, as long as Microsoft can get some good PR it is all A-OK
I bet Microsoft could shutdown all kinds of malware if we all just allow them to continually monitor all of our computers at all times....
The only thing we know is that they were under sealed court order.
Namecoin is not a magical solution to every problem with domain registration, and it barely scratches the surface of the decentralization issue as it's pretty cheap for anyone with the budget of a nation state to 'recentralize' the namecoin system, let alone a $5 wrench.
When it comes to things being seized under sealed court order, the authorities usually don't have a problem finding a wrench.
In the vast majority of cases law enforcement and court actions against domains are justifiable and benefit the internet.
Based on what stats?
It's not going to be something that legitimate companies are going to use for their primary domain name for a long time. More than that, it's going to be used in niche applications - decentralised identity (id/ rather than u/), primarily, along with being used as a name service for things like OpenBazaar and maybe Tor.
On the other hand, if you happen to run a company or project and have some form of cryptocurrency, you might as well exchange some of that for namecoins and register d/whatever, just in case.
If a startup had snagged one of these domains and had built a community or SEO with it, could you imagine that being taken away from them without any sort of due process?
The sealed bit is weird, but bankruptcy judges are awfully sensitive to economic value. I'd be surprised if they would do something like that.
Of course, if the domain were seized in that case, due process would still be available. The startup's lawyer would immediately file with the judge in question asking for control to be temporarily restored to the startup while the legal stuff plays out.
- "Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?"
"Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!"
- "Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!"
from 'A Man For All Seasons', by Robert Bolt
What makes you so mad towards them?
You can tell from the language that the OP knew of an opportunity to buy mispriced assets and/or renew their domain, and having failed to take the opportunity is now upset at others having taken the opportunities they missed.
You know the kind of people that couldn't be bothered to spend $90 for a 10 year registration and now have to pay a few hundred to get a domain back they wasn't worth $10, or clicking the 'auto-renew' button to them.
There has to be some mechanism to release unused & unregistered domains back to the market.
And careful - you just dehumanized an entire set of people ("they're not people") because of the work they do. Domainners might be annoying - but they're not gangsters.
Only reason they they let this happen is because it's good for business. I'm sure domain like 95 percent of domain registrations are done by these so called "domainers" or people protecting themselves from then.
You'd have to be a big fan of the coase theorem to enjoy paying $20 for a $0.20 parking space, when the only thing the seller has done to add value is get in your way.
Applicability to domains: maybe they should all be auctioned?
In this space - it's akin much more to having parking spaces near a sporting event or concert. In which case - there's lot of happy people willing to pay $20 for the privilege of parking.
Also - you should know that pricing goods based on "what they cost" isn't the proper way to valuate a property, service, etc. If that was the case, every user past 1,000 in most SAAS apps should just ask for their subscription to be free.
Also - calm down. There are businesses that are way worse than domainers.
That might be a reason for you to not do something even worse. But it doesn't make you less of a parasite.
In some cases, speculators provide actual value. E.g., they prove or maintain the assets that they speculate on. In others, as with financial speculators, they provide liquidity to the market.
Neither is true for domain speculators. They get paid for making the world worse.
Some domainners have lots of domains & develop lots of them into valuable properties. Sure - they have a few that are parked - but that's a percentage.
Typically - money is a measure of value you add to the world. They have to be adding some sort of value in the world or they wouldn't be able to extract value from their activities.
The classic medieval example is a bandit or a warlord who take over a section of road and extracts tolls. He didn't build the road, but he can extract plenty of money as long as he controls it.
If you acquired that domain through the 'aftermarket', especially if it had lapsed we now know that if that entity should ever go bankrupt there is a potential problem.
And even in that case I assume you could object against this in some way (though the story does not detail any of that so far, we'll have to wait to see how it all plays out).
I'll be following this quite closely, to say that I'm surprised here is an understatement.
There is even potential for a chain of bankruptcies causing repeated clawback of the same domain!
The domain name community looks to be all over the comment section of the original post.