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

[Lightner, Jeffrey]

No.   If a domain expires then anyone that wants can legally register it.

Most of the time after the "expiration" for your registration the registrar will keep it for 60 days but "park it" so it no longer points to your web site/DNS.   During that period you can renew the registration and they'll bring you back up as you were.

I'm guessing from what you said, the non-profit simply waited until the registrar's 60 days passed and just registered it as if it were a new domain again.

If the original name is important then it is usual to keep the registration and simply do web redirection of some sort to the new web page on the newer domain.   We do a fair number of acquisitions here and redirect most to one of our existing brands or to our main generic product web site.   On the generic site it determines which brand you get by the zip code you input when checking to see if our products are available in your area.

Whoever maintains the web page can generally add in rules to accept the old URL and do the redirection to the new URL.   


-----Original Message-----
From: Ale <ale-bounces at ale.org> On Behalf Of Todor Fassl via Ale
Sent: Thursday, September 12, 2019 11:15 AM
To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts <ale at ale.org>
Subject: [ale] Interesting (to me at least) tale of woe and a question

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?

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