Goddamn the Pusher man: Nominet kicks out domain name hijack bid Nominet has thrown out an attempt at reverse domain name hijacking after some, er, pushy Brits tried seizing their old web address from a fast-fingered fellow in Romania. Pusher Ltd failed in its attempt to take control of the domain pusher.co.uk from Lee Owen, a resident of Romania, after forgetting to renew its registration …
I started to receive emails about 8 months after I last renewed my domain (a .com) regarding renewal. I contacted the registrar because I'd paid for ten years and should therefore have had 9 years and two months to go. I also started to get emails from other companies who were wondering if I wanted to register similar domains. The registrar admitted that they had buggered up the renewal and selected 1 instead of 10 years. They fixed it immediately but it was a interesting to see how quickly and how often I was contacted about renewing.
Well, duh. But sometimes it goes wrong. I lost a domain set to auto-renew because the registrar took the money and forgot to renew it. However if you check the contract, all you can get back is the fee. Still, the loss of the domain wasn't an issue for me, and I told the Russian cyber-squatter who tried to hold me to ransom over it to take a hike.
From time to time I check the domain, as in "just now" and yes, the idiot is still sitting on the domain and it has cost him more than I paid for it, ten times more, to maintain it. He's an idiot.
Maybe the Romanian buyer bought the pusher.co.uk domain to set up a drug dealing business here in Blighty. Who knows?
Many domains don't require you be a resident of the country to register them, I own 2 domains that belong to countries that I have not even visited never mind lived in, purely because they are short, spelt out an English word and are easy to remember.
The best domain that wasn't for the company you might have thought it would be was back in the day - Baa.com
So the British Airports Authority might have been a logical guess but it wasn't owned by them. It was in fact hosting a website about sheep and wool. See here for proof: https://web.archive.org/web/20000520095021/http://www.baa.com:80/
Fine, Pusher fucked up and didn't do its due diligence. I get that.
Now please explain to me why some guy in Romania needs a .co.uk domain in the first place, and explain in detail why he needs it to be named Pusher. He wants the domain ? Okay, give him a month to set up a viable business website and start doing business.
If he doesn't start doing business within a month, then he purchased the domain in bad faith and it should go back to Pusher - with an administrative fee tacked onto it, of course (like, triple normal - lessons and all that).
This would be an interesting development in internet domain purchases. Some authority gets to decide whether you "need" a domain, whether you can justify its name, and whether what you're doing with it is a "viable" business.
No problem I can see there. None at all.
Actually, that's what JANET does with .ac.uk domains. Even though the application process is web-based these days, all applications go through a Naming Committee and the applicant has to justify why they want a particular .ac.uk domain. They can be quite fussy about what they'll accept, but no money changes hands until the application is accepted.
They also have a specific rule for "Generic" domain names - from their Eligibility Policy:
"Generic domain names, which could be applicable to a number of eligible sites, must provide evidence that they have the backing and approval from the majority of relevant members of the UK academic and/or research community, in order to be permitted to have that generic domain name".
This mostly covers domain names based on a single dictionary word, but anything which could be legitimartely claimed by multiple sites can also come under this rule.
There effectively already is this embargo.
After your expiry date, they tend to wait 30 days before dropping your glue records. Then 60 days after that your registration is deleted. During that time you can renew, but no-one else can buy the domain - however, in the final 60 days you may have to pay an additional fee.
So that's 90 days after domain expiry, and after 60 days of outage that the opportunity arises for someone else to buy your domain.
And you get multiple, regular emails telling you that your domain is coming up for expiry, has expired and is in the grace period, is now in the redemption period, will be released, gone.
The timings are different (tighter) for .com and other TLDs.
I recently had all that with a domain I _wanted_ to let lapse. The repeated emails are kind of frustrating in that scenario, because you can't really miss them
My guess is that they hit the redemption period, didn't want to pay an additional £60 fee, so figured they'd wait for it to hit the market and then renew for 15.99 and lost that gamble.
But after a while, you stop being able to use the domain - because it's lapsed. So there's no website or email associated with it.
Assuming that that didn't happen for the first 30 days, that gives them at least 6 weeks to wise up.
And if they didn't feel the need to pay another £60, I have to question whether it was actually THAT important to their business anyway?
Unfortunately it would seem that
And you get multiple, regular emails telling you that your domain is coming up for expiry, has expired and is in the grace period, is now in the redemption period, will be released, gone.
No longer applies (sample of one).
One of my domains, supposed to be automatic renewal (and paid for), wasn't renewed by the hosting company, and the first I knew about it, was when I received an email from Nominet saying that the domain HAD expired.
YMMV
This post has been deleted by its author
So you think that nominet don't send emails because you got an email from nominet????
( 'expired' is not the same as 'suspended' or 'cancelled' - i.e. you got the message at the start of your grace period, not at the time when someone else could register it)
"And you get multiple, regular emails telling you that your domain is coming up for expiry, has expired and is in the grace period, is now in the redemption period, will be released, gone."
None of which helps if the email address is someone who has left the company, gone sick or for whatever other reason, isn't reading emails.
That doesn't make it anyone else's fault. If the company put their asset under the control of someone and didn't check that that person was doing what they should be doing, it becomes their fault and their problem. You have no right to a domain name; your right to use the name starts when you buy it and ends when your agreed time of purchase ends. At that point, the name is available again. From the sound of it, the policy provides for a convenient length of time so a matter of minutes can't kill the domain. If they didn't notice that 1) the registrar is sending a bunch of important-looking messages to us about our domain and 2) the services that happen from our domain have stopped being used and if you go to the domain you get a DNS lookup failure, then they don't seem to be doing the proper tests I'd expect from the least technical of organizations.
There is a grace time built in already. But nominet term it 'suspension'
Not only did they not renew it in advance, they also: didn't renew within the first 30 days after expiry (it would've still been working), then didn't notice that it stopped working for another 60 days before it was cancelled and someone else was able to register it.
So they had 90 days after the expiry date to do something, and for 60 of those days the domain didn't work at all.
I don't have much sympathy for them.
https://www.nominet.uk/domain-support/#faq
Looks like a classic due diligence failure on the part of Pusher. If the domain name is that important to them shouldn't there have been policies in place to get it renewed? Even a calendar reminder would have been better than nothing.
I'm still not sure why a person from Romania would need a .co.uk domain though.
Especially as they don't seem to be doing anything with it at the moment. In Jormany at least I think they'd have more of a chance of getting the domain back: domains, like trademarks, have to be asserted to remain valid so squatting on them is of little value. But, yeah, they shouldn't have let it lapse in the first place.
I'm still not sure why a person from Romania would need a .co.uk domain though.
The main thing is it's an irrelevancy why they want it. It's good enough that they are entitled to own it and chose to do so.
There are cases where legitimacy in acquiring a particular domain name needs to be proven but when that's not in the rules it's not in the rules.
As someone above noted 'Lee Owen' doesn't sound like a Romanian name so could be an expat who desires to retain a presence in the UK; a .co.uk domain would be ideal for that and entirely reasonable.
A company I worked for handed responsibility for buying and maintaining domain names to one of the marketeers. The guy bought every variation of the company's (already too many) domain names to 'protect the brand' - it cost a fortune. I never did understand why the marketeers in general thought that any potential customer might visit <boring name>.XXX and expect to reach <boring company>. A year or so later a long-standing customer told us that visiting <boring name>.co.uk now took him to a different company's website. Oops. The marketeer had left our company and his company e-mail address which had been used for registration had been closed down. The related paperwork had been filed in the 'I don't have time for this technical shit' folder by his former colleagues.
Cue much finger-pointing.
Been there, seen that, got the t-shirt.
Buying up multiple domains and pointing them at the same content is as lethal to your search engine ranking as stuffing pages full of irrelevant META tags. Yes, people still pull this "SEO" crap, then wonder why they only appear on page 30 of Google's results.
I've also had to chase down former employees to get domains renewed/transferred. As I've said before, they're assets, and should be treated as such. Keep track of them, and don't let random people register them on your behalf - or at least get them to transfer such domains to you before they leave.
We had this happen almost 1 year to the day after being spun off by a very large company. Of course, the person who registered our new domain had been a consultant, and the renewal got lost..our fault...So someone bought it, and we paid through the nose to get it back... We did learn our lesson after only one screwup.
Except Pusher clearly is completely in the wrong. Did Owen buy the domain in completely bad faith? Sure, very likely. But he did it according to the rules, and now it's his. There is _no law_ that Pusher "ought to" keep their domain name no matter what. They fucked up, now they can pay the price. Intent and faith, good or bad, does not come into it.
I find this type of person to be really annoying, as they have found a bunch of domains that eventually someone will want and will only give them away in exchange for much more than most of them are worth. That said, they have the rights to those domains, and I don't. It's annoying because I want to buy them for less than the domain resellers want to get, but it is not as if they've done anything improper in obtaining them. If they disappear tomorrow, I'd be happy, but I would not do anything nor would I want anything done to them to take away the things they obtained in a completely legal way.
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