Domain Camping Must be Stopped!
<RANT>I’m tired of domain camping. There needs to be a challenge process that can be requested for those interested in getting a domain that has nothing on it. I would be happy to pay $1-$5 to GoDaddy if they would: 1) See how long someone has owned a domain. 2) See if there is anything at that domain. 3) If #1 is greater than 90 days, and #2 is “nothing’s there,” they send a warning to the owner. 4) The owner has 30 days to respond by putting something on the site or it’s no longer theirs. It wouldn’t solve all the issues, but it would be something.</RANT>
I agree, it is odd that just 30 min ago my hubby and I were discussing that exact same issue. We were looking into a couple of domain names that we wanted, but of course they were taken, and of course there was nothing on them…
Oh and Happy Valentines!
Yeah, it does suck. Companies buy up thousands of domains just to “park” them with useless search sites. Surprisingly, there is pretty good money in it the way things are run right now. They put up Google ads and make money that way, or price the sites to sell for a ridiculous amount.
Whats even more annoying is domain snatching. Happened to me over a year ago. I let my domain name expire so i could re-register it under a cheaper provider. Little did I know that someone had back ordered it….a domain that is so meaningless and unwanted that it still exists as a big nothing. Some company is trying to resell it, but they haven’t succeeded at all this past year.
My buddy has made around $400k from the domain names he purchased in the early 90s. He saw the future and bought a bunch of names. It has paid off for him.
By the way, what name were you trying to get? Pay me 100k and I will talk it over with my buddy to let you have it.
Sadly, what would happen is that the current owners would realize that someone wants that domain. They would answer the request in most of the cases, because they bought the name for that reason (to find someone to sell it to).
Simply pointing it to a personal blog would be enough excuse to avoid legal action, isn’t it? They even would not need to build a webpage to justify the ownership of the name. They could use the same blog over and over again.
I think we need anothhedgehog er solution. I don’t know…. mmm … what about giving hedgehogs to all of them and asking politely to sit on it?
We still would have the domains problem, but laugh relaxes and when you are relaxed, it is easier to find a solution
By the way, I checked the domain isilion.com and after two days someone bought it (I realized when I tried to do it). This might be a coincidence, but few days later someone wrote me asking me for 90$ if I wanted the domain.
I guess they have some kind of system logging the whois request made by the potential buyers, so they know what do you intend to buy in advance.
Actually, Ryan, there is a process in place if the owner of a domain has no business or legal purpose for the ownership. I used to work in politics and we sued and won domains all the time.
If, for example, I was camping http://www.ryanshwayder.com, you can petition to aquire the domain and if I can’t prove a valid business purpose for owning it, I have to release it to you for my costs associated with tha ownership. Corps are strating to use this quite a bit more now as well.
Its a bitch to get it accomplished by I have ninja’d about 15 different sites because I waded through the red tape and had a solid legal staff to sort everything out.
One could theorize that Green Monster Games is tired of only owning http://www.greenmonstergames.net and would like to own http://www.greenmonstergames.com?
Unfortunately, domain squatting has been big business. It requires very little work, and thanks to places like Godaddy, its very cheap to register a domain name for long periods of time, and if in that 7+ years someone happens to want it, you’ll always get more for it than you spent. Companies willing to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars for names perpetuate this.
And to address two issues from previous commentors… any site than generates traffic is worth money to a squatter, so if you had a site and it ever went into or came out of a search engine, they’ll back order it. Further, with companies looking to position products, there are people who monitor whois activity and will shell out the couple of bucks it takes to get a domain that someone might be willing to buy.
Squatting has proven many times over to pay off… people who initially grabbed simple domains made out like bandits.
It happened to me again…
I tried to buy a domain just now and discovered that it (and all the similar ones) was already registered by the same company.
And all the domains are just parked. Not webpages or anything (What for? There is no need to hide).
Sigh…
You could always try for a Latin word.
There are solutions… Domains and spam can be easily regulated for fairness, but these regulatory solutions would require slight changes to how Internet business is transacted. “Slight changes” to the Web are always perceived and treated like “New Game Experiences”.
Personally, I prefer the “find the bastard in the Cayman Islands and beat him to death” and “locate the company in the Cayman Islands and torch the place” approaches. Let’s not forget Tucows. Death to Tucows.
I expect that someday a Fair Domain Registration Practices Act will be passed given that we already have a Fair Debt Collection Practices Act.
Jeff Freeman: You could always try for a Latin word.
That is the problem. I already have done that. Now I would like to buy the english acceptation, which is the one “camped”.
Anyway, thanks for your suggestion
Cyndre’s answer is of great help, though my problem is not that serious. Thank you too, Cyndre!
Well if you’re going to start a company, always research domain names first. The same thing goes for products.
I’m with Garthilk - don’t create an IP without researching domain names.
The problem is that its is becoming increasingly appearant (to me anyway) that some groups out there are monitoring whois traffic. So many times I’ve gone just for fun to look up domain names, they’ll be available one day, then the next day someone will have bought it and its just pointing to one of those placeholder sites, or worse a page that actually says the domain is for sale.
You almost can’t research domain names before buying domain names… you practically have to buy one and then just stick with it even if you change your mind.
*Sigh* When we were trying to nip domain squatting in the bud early on, the problem was finding a clear-cut deliniation: Back in 1995 a request came across my desk for some “media” company asking for the domain “leon.co.uk”. Rules were that the domain had to reflect the company name. The “media” part made me suspicious, and since there was a perfectly good company called “leon.co.uk” I rudely declined the request.
As I was getting on the tube on the way home, a movie poster caught my eye - printed along the bottom was that previously unseen “://” of a URL. On a movie poster. Not on a monitor screen. “http://www.leon.co.uk/”. Oops.
One of my guys in that circle of people in the UK at the time was Ivan Pope the entrepreneur who set up NetNames.
I remember, with hellish clarity, the inter-ISP meeting where we were explaining to a committee why we were so passionate about having clear and determinstic rules for ownership of a “.CO.uk” domain name and the creation of “.plc.uk” and “.ltd.uk” namespaces, that it was the “unauthorized and unrequested representation, i.e. purchase solely for the purpose of resale” that we were concerned about… And seeing the light go on in Ivan’s eyes.
To his credit, Ivan knew how to make money - he published a book which did rather well despite over half of it being a listing of co.uk domains and their contact details… And he did become a founding member of the company I helped push the industry to create to pro-actively protect the name space (Nominet) eventually becoming a protector of the namespace rather than a sponger.
Although sometimes people do get their domains through legal action, it still turns my stomach that it still isn’t legally recognized as racketeering - these people hunt down other people’s IP inventions and creations for the sole purpose of forcing the inventor to pay a surcharge for access to their own IP under the guise of “protection”.
Erh: perfectly good company called ‘leon’, not ‘leon.co.uk’) and Ivan was “one of my peers” not “one of my guys”.