In a recent article posted on CircleID, author “Talented Fool” writes about registrars taking over domains when they enter the expiration grace period in an article titled “Riding on Expiring Domains”. These registrars replace the domain owner’s site with a parking page, and often sell these domains through expiring domain services like SnapNames. Talented Fool suggests that this is a violation of the domain owner’s property rights.
I can’t disagree more. If a registrar puts its own site on a non-expired domain, that would be wrong. But we’re talking about a domain that someone has discontinued paying for. If you stop paying your rent, you get evicted. People that believe grace periods are there for abuse are the same people that pay their credit card bills late. There’s no difference here. Talented Fool also writes:
If it’s fair to assume the most likely time potential buyers will know your are serious about selling a domain is during the grace period (this is the 45 days after your registration renewal date), it’s easy to see why this is such a popular process with registrars.
But what if you wanted to post your own web page with a notice that may provide a sale where you would keep 100% of your sale price – not 15% [which you are owed if a drop service sells your expiring domain]?
Well, here’s an idea. Pay another $8 to renew the domain and put up your for sale sign.
TalentedFool says
If you’ve ever gotten a phone bill that said “Due on the 1st” and “After the 10th add $X late fee.” then you probably figured you were safe mailing out a check on Friday the 3rd. It’s called a grace period.
But what if on the 2nd your phone number was mysteriously answerd by the phone company marketing people? And what if your number wasn’t just any number, but one of those vanity numbers that spelled out your home town or something? Would you think it was okay for the phone company to be soliciting participants for an auction of your vanity number? I think not.
But that’s just one aspect of the issue.
If you’ve ever seen one of those real estate course shows on TV, you may have heard them telling you how you can make a fortune on homes that are about to go into foreclosure. The idea is simple: people that are about to lose their home will sell it reasonably. So, take a guess what all the people that take the real estate course are looking for. Well the same thing applies to domain names. Your best chance of attracting a bunch of real domain investors is right before it’s set to expire. Why in the world do you think registrars are bothering to take the domains? Why do they hide your contact information from the whois records? Because they know there’s money to be made and they don’t want potential buyers contacting you to buy your domain name — all they get then is another year’s registration fees.
But wait, isn’t that all they’re entitled to? I mean it was YOU that thought up the name. It was YOU that shelled out the registration fee. They didn’t want to partner up with you then. All they wanted then was a profit off your registration. They don’t have a cent invested in your name, but all of a sudden they are going to take the thing right when it’s at it’s highest sale potential and hide your ownership information!
But wait, what if you didn’t even want to sell it. What if, like the phone bill you were just using the grace period allowed and in a few of weeks you go ahead and pay the registration fees for another year? Surely, the registrar will give a few bucks for all the advertising they were doing on your domain name, right? No? Well they’ll give you a break on the registration fee, right? No? Well, at least they’ll start your new registration on the day you pay instead of making you pay for those weeks they were advertising on your domain name, right? Not a chance.
And now guess what. Once you’ve paid for the full year – including the time the registrar was using your name – they unlock it and let you have back control, but you STILL can’t use your domain name! You see, in order to take control of your name they had to replace your name servers with their name servers. So now that you’ve gotten it back, you have to change the name servers back to what they should have been all along and wait another three days for that information to propagate across the Internet.
I don’t know; maybe “Editor” didn’t think it out too well. It sure seems like an unethical way to do business to me, and I don’t think “pay another $8” is much of an answer. Unless he means “pay another $8 IN ADVANCE so they don’t steal your domain name during your legal grace period.” And frankly, I don’t think that’s much of an answer either.
Editor says
I suppose that’s where you an I differ. If your phone bill is due on the 1st, you should pay it by the 1st. When I said pay another $8, I did mean in advance–before it expired, like you’re supposed to.
I do agree that the way some registrars (e.g. Register.com) change the WhoIs is rather incovenient, but I’ve found that most other registrars don’t do this.
Changing the DNS servers back to you is no big deal and takes just a few minutes. I’m assuming you didn’t have an active web site anyway or you wouldn’t have let it expire.
Incidently, I think your 15% of a name sold at SnapNames will be higher than you would have gotten trying to sell the domain on your own. The expiration process attracts tons of buyers, and I see domains auctioned off for a lot more in this process than on typical sales boards.
Editor says
Apparently I’m not the only one who disagrees with “Talented Fool”. Read the latest comments here.