[ale] Interesting (to me at least) tale of woe and a question

[Todor Fassl]

I asked about this years ago on this list. I was doing some volunteer 
work for a non-profit (not IT stuff) when their IT guy died. It wasn't a 
surprise but they were totally unprepared. The biggest problem was that 
he had registered their domain under his own name and no one knew the 
password for the account on the registrar web site. Worse, the 
registration was set to expire in a matter of days.

I contacted the registrar and they said I'd have to send them a copy of 
the death certificate. Okay, I went to the guy's son and got him to take 
a picture of the cert with his phone. I forwarded it to the registrar 
and they were still like, "Legally, we can't give you access to that 
account." Why not? You told me you'd send me a password change token if 
I sent you the death certificate. Whoever told you that was wrong. *YOU* 
told me that.

So there were a couple of lawyers in the non-profit. They said, yeah, 
there's no such law. ICAN has policies but they're not laws. And there 
is no ICAN policy that says you cannot hand over an account if the owner 
dies.

To this day I do not understand why the registrar was giving me the 
runaround.  Eventually, the domain expired and they started sending us 
messages saying that they'd keep it working for now out of the goodness 
of their hearts but we'd better renew now. I forwarded those messages 
back to their own support people but to no avail. Eventually, they 
stopped responding to my emails. The non-profit got a new domain name on 
a different (obviously) registrar.

Over the years I lost touch with the non-profit. But I see now that they 
somehow did get the old domain name back under their own name. It is now 
registered to the non-profit itself. Problem is it doesn't go anywhere. 
The only reason they are still paying for it is because they don't want 
anyone else to get it. Is there a way to make a domain name go away for 
forever?