Anyone dealt with dotster giving their domain away?

[ILoveHostasaurus]

We have a customer who had their domain registered with dotster.com and had renewed it for a few years at a time. The email address doster had for them eventually went bad and they missed their renewal about five weeks ago. Well the domain just stopped working yesterday and has been pointed to one of those bogus pay per click pages so someone can capitalize on their incoming traffic. The problem here is that dotster has given the domain to someone else without having gone through the redemption period where the domain should have been shut down or non-working for 30 days prior to letting someone else register it; that would have of course let the owner know and they could have renewed it. Additionally, it appears dotster has just changed the ownership by shifting the details over to someone else since the domain still says it was created in 1999. Both of those activities appear to violate the policies in place for .com domain registrations and deletes, but is there any recourse that anyone knows of beyond a month long process of disputing the registration?

[Vic - WolfPaw Computers]

Re: Anyone dealt with dotster giving their domain away?

It is the registrant's responsibility to update contact information and keep on top of their registration.

Once the domain expires, ICANN allows a 14 day grace period for the registrant to renew the domain. If it is not renewed after 14 days after expiration, they can assume the name has been abandoned and can sell it to anyone who wants it.

This is why it is very important to keep your domain registration and whois information up to date.

We have a customer who had their domain registered with dotster.com and had renewed it for a few years at a time. The email address doster had for them eventually went bad and they missed their renewal about five weeks ago. Well the domain just stopped working yesterday and has been pointed to one of those bogus pay per click pages so someone can capitalize on their incoming traffic. The problem here is that dotster has given the domain to someone else without having gone through the redemption period where the domain should have been shut down or non-working for 30 days prior to letting someone else register it; that would have of course let the owner know and they could have renewed it. Additionally, it appears dotster has just changed the ownership by shifting the details over to someone else since the domain still says it was created in 1999. Both of those activities appear to violate the policies in place for .com domain registrations and deletes, but is there any recourse that anyone knows of beyond a month long process of disputing the registration?

[ILoveHostasaurus]

Re: Anyone dealt with dotster giving their domain away?

Are you sure that is correct? All parties involved realize it's the registrant's responsibility to keep track of it and keep the info updated, but I was under the impression that the .com redemption period of the domain not working was mandatory? So dotster should have put it into redemption, which would have taken their site and email down, and they could have renewed it at that point. Instead, they left it running until the 30 + 5 days had passed and then gave it to someone else so our customer went home yesterday with everything working and came in this morning to someone else using their domain for affiliate spam.

[d_host]

Re: Anyone dealt with dotster giving their domain away?

Well, 5 weeks is longer than 30 days, and chances are they have been emailing the client - at the wrong address - to let them know about this issue. Hardly a dotster problem, if the client didn't update his/her own records and didn't notify dotster about his/her new email address...

There's not much you can do after 30 days other than see if the domain is perhaps still in "redemption period" - in which case ICAAN has an $80/domain re-activation fee. In many cases the domain will be in redemption period for a while, even though it may look like it was already given away to someone else. As long as you pay the $80 fee within ICAAN approved period, there's a high chance that dotster will be able to get the domain back to the original owner.

[ILoveHostasaurus]

Re: Anyone dealt with dotster giving their domain away?

My question is not about that though, I'm trying to determine if it is within the guidelines dotster has to operate under that they left the domain fully functional during the redemption period that may or may not have occurred. If they had shut the domain off 30 days ago, 5 days after it expired, then the problem would have been resolved easily. The other question was whether they can reassign it like that to another customer of theirs without giving it back to the .com for open registration; since the domain is still showing the original registration date of 1999 which in effect means dotster is publishing false information.

My understanding, which may be wrong, is that redemption period is mandatory before a domain can be sold to someone else and that redemption period is a period of time that the .com registry handles and that the domain does not work during that time. If that is correct, then that would mean dotster did not release the domain to redemption period and instead sat on it until they felt like selling it to someone else, which I don't think is allowed.

[d_host]

Re: Anyone dealt with dotster giving their domain away?

Last time I looked at the ICAAN regulations the 30-day redemption period is simply a "courtesy extension" to the domain registration in case the domain owner is away from the office/home, on vacation, etc, and cannot check their email in a timely fashion to address an expiring domain name right away. 30 days should be long enough for most people to get back from vacation, catch up with their email, etc. I believe all registrars follow the same procedures where the domain remains active during the redemption period, but the second that expires - the domain goes into a 'secondary limbo state' as I call it. While you can renew a domain within the initial 30 days at the regular rates, after that (in the 'limbo' state) ICAAN has an $80 domain reactivation fee to assign the domain back to the original owner. I don't recall how long this period is - could be 30 days, could be 60 - check with ICAAN or dotster policy agreement. I know we've had a client with a very similar issue with GoDaddy - three of their domains expired, notification emails went to an old address they weren't checking, and all three domains were assigned to a different entity. After paying GoDaddy $240 5-6 weeks after these domains initially expired, they reinstated all three of them - though it did take about 4-5 business days, so don't expect instantaneous turnaround.

[ILoveHostasaurus]

Re: Anyone dealt with dotster giving their domain away?

They're going through dotster's dispute procedure now, not sure what will come of it, hopefully a good result. They will still have the option of going the long icann dispute route since the domain includes a trademark but that's a multi-month process. This was the first I've seen where a registrar did not turn the domain off if it did make it into the blackhole portion of redemption where you have to pay $150+ to get a domain back.