Foster agency failed to renew domain and says it is being held for ransom.
The practice of domain investing can get a bad rap sometimes, and this story is an example of why.
A UK foster agency used the domain name littleacornsfostering.com for many years but failed to renew it earlier this year. Someone bought the expired domain and is asking the company for £9,000 if it wants to buy the domain.
A couple things come to mind when reading this story.
First, I’m surprised that the agency didn’t notice the domain expired during the required DNS disruption. This is a period of at least eight days that the registrar must change the DNS to alert the owner that the domain has expired.
Second, I personally stay away from domains like littleacornsfostering.com that seem like they would only be used by one company. I buy expired domains that were previously used, but only if it seems like there would be a broad appeal for the domain name rather than selling it back to the company that previously owned it.
This domain may have more backlinks and other features in SEO. It’s still valuable for the previous owner. Also, some more paper-based documents may have the domain as the company’s website. It looks the previous owner lose much. If the company wants to use other domain instead of this one, some of online business would be rebuilt.
As a result, after the cost assessment, the company should make an immediate decision.
Yeah I have no it erst in selling expired domains to he previous owner as they feel entitled to it and rarely will end up in a good sale.
Interest?
I’d be interested to hear if anyone thinks this practice is ethically justifiable.
I’m inclined to think you and I are about to agree on something…
Sound good. Unless you are somebody I disagree with, “John”.
Well I guess that depends on whether you ever edited that one big post some people were so unhappy about in recent months and which I was rather frank about myself in comments you replied to. Personally I never checked.
Oh, and of course there was the minor issue of the ICANN transition prior to that…
The case is more complicated than it seems: http://domaingang.com/domain-news/little-acorns-fostering-lost-com-domain-to-squatter-but-who-is-to-blame/
Very similar thing happened to one of my clients. They let their name lapse because they were clueless about such things. Somebody scooped it up and redirected it to porn site. Then asked for a goodly sum to get it back. It wasn’t a huge amount of money, but it was a charity and they couldn’t afford even that, so they had to move to new domain. It was enormously disruptive and a total scumbag move.
I’d guess this is actually a pretty common practice. It would not surprise me if there are people who specialize in doing this. I imagine it could be quite lucrative.
The “practice” of buying expired domains is ethical and not required to be justified, it is, simply, a business like any other business.
Acquiring domain names that have legitimately gone through the domain expiration process is akin to purchasing real estate that goes up for auction.
It is not the responsibility of the buyer to determine the reason that the owner dropped the domain name, it is the responsibility of the domain owner to maintain ownership of the domain name so that it does not expire.
Real estate analogies are fun.
Due to an administrative error, a foster family forgets to pay the affordable $10 per year rent on their home, so they are evicted.
Let’s say it happens while they’re on vacation, so they didn’t even know they were being evicted.
They return from vacation to find all their stuff has gone, the house has been sold, and the new landlord wants to charge them a penalty equivalent to 900 years of rent before he will hand over the keys.
There’s definitely an ethical dimension to this.
Ethically, the family has a legal obligation to pay the holder of the mortgage and the local tax authorities — that pay for roads, schools, etc. — just like the rest of us if they want to retain control of the property for which they share ownership with the mortgage holder until the mortgage is paid in full. “Forgetting” to pay one’s obligations under the legal regime in place is no excuse. If you fail to pay, the authorities in the legal regime seize your property and auction it off to the highest bidder, who becomes the new owner. In the case of domain names, ICANN makes the rules and people need to follow those rules if they want to retain control of the rights to the name. If you don’t follow ICANN’s rules, you forfeit your rights to the name and the name becomes available to the public again for the greater good of the Internet.
I believe this was a conversation about ethics rather than one about what is within and without the rules. We all know the rules.
The domain in this case is cute, but it’s clearly not particularly valuable. It’s certainly not worth $9,000, no matter which way you spin it, unless the buyer is the original owner.
This is quite possibly a case of a domainer trying to capitalize on his better knowledge of the system to rip off what appears to be a family trying to do a bit of good in the world.
“They should have known the rules,” may stand up in a court of law, but I doubt it would stand up in the court of public opinion.
Martin Shkreli (yes, I’m switching analogies here) acted within the rules when he raised the price of AIDS/toxoplasmosis drugs from $13.50 to $750 per pill, and you’d be hard pressed to find somebody who believes he acted ethically. Most people think he’s the worst scum in the world.
Not the same thing, but same ball-park.
Given you’re commenting anonymously, I suppose you will have no hesitation in agreeing that Shkreli also acted ethically, because he acted within the rules.
If i were to give domains back to their previous owners whenever they email me asking to do so, i’d be giving back several a week on average. Typically when a previous owner emails me i don’t even respond because 90% of the time it goes nowhere. I am not giving the domain back just because they forgot to renew.
There’s a wide range of options in this instance between “giving it back” and “charging $9,000”.
there’s buying expired domains based on keywords and then there is buying domains based on the stupidity of people who didn’t think their domain would expire.
i buy a lot of domains but my focus is totally based on keywords,
there are too many whose strategy is based on preying on business owners with little to no domain knowledge who let their domain expire.
think huge domains here
Unfortunately, greed will always surpass ethics in most cases
Obviously. Thanks. You have met other people before.
The seller could have spun this into a feel good news story with considerable positive PR if they’d asked the foster company to make a donation to a children’s charity for the domain’s return. Instead the seller has made a dumb move and tried to sell the domain for a price the previous owner will never pay and now faces the cost and hassle of defending legal action. Dumb greedy move, not a smart domainer.
There are a lot of areas in life one could simply scream ” that isn’t ethical ” , good luck with that.
I suppose if the foster agency opened their books to show that their management really can’t afford such fee, the domainer would drop his price. You can see their filing here https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/08142014/filing-history
and their director’s wages aren’t that high.
dude there are more ways to make a buck than preying on people who don’t know what they are doing
right now on godaddy there is a good living to be made with high moral code
there are so many people in the domain industry that are nothing more than base animals preying on anything that comes into their primitive perspective
and i hold over 700 domains