"you wake up one morning to find that your Website has disappeared, your email has stopped working and a person you've never heard of is now listed as the owner of your domain name!"
Such a Kafka-esque loss of digital identity is actually surprisingly common. The main cause is not the well publicised phenomenon of "domain hijacking", but something much more mundane. It's this: for one reason or another, the domain was simply not renewed at the end of its expiration period. When this happens, the sponsoring registrar issues a delete command to the registry, and the name is quickly made available for any party to register.
If the domain is for personal use, then it's no big deal. You learn from the experience and register a new name instead. But what if the name was an integral part of your business strategy? Losing it could cause untold damage to your business.
Success Increases Risk
So what exactly are the chances that other parties might attempt to register your name if it ever did get deleted? Don't be naive and believe that your name is only worth something to you. This is truly not the case. Perversely, the chances of the name being valuable to other parties -- domain speculators in particular -- increase in proportion to how successful you've been in building up your online business.
To understand the reasoning behind this statement, you have to get inside the mind of a typical domain speculator. A year or two ago, most speculators simply registered "virgin" domain names, in the hope that they could sell them on to site developers. In other words, they gambled on the value of the name itself. As it turned out, most speculators were awful at inventing good domain names, and many lost their shirts employing this methodology. "Hurrah!" you say. However, when the dot com bubble burst, speculators came up with a new strategy: the re-registration of "used" domain names. In particular, they like to re-register used domains with "built-in" traffic -- i.e. domains that have incoming links from other Websites, search engines and directories.
With these types of names, speculators are not the slightest bit interested in the actual value of the name itself -- it could be rat-splat-drat.org for all they care. If a name produces traffic, an averagely intelligent reptile could make money from it. Just put up a one-page pay-per-click (PPC) search engine, or any decent (or indecent) affiliate program, and the revenues will roll in.
So, given that domain speculators are now looking for domain names with traffic rather than branding value, you can see that any Website that's been successful, and has built up tens or hundreds of incoming links, is a prime candidate for domain speculators should the name ever be deleted.
How To Get Your Name Back
Now that you know why a speculator might re-register your domain name, let's move on to the crux of the matter: just how do you go about getting your name back should the nightmare come true, and your name be deleted? The first thing to get out of your mind is the notion that this is still "your" domain name.
While you'll undoubtedly feel that the name's still yours, the harsh truth is that your rights expired along with the domain name. Most people will naturally contact their domain registrar first, on the assumption that somehow the registrar will be able to "sort it out" for them. But every registrar will give you the same response. If you didn't pay the renewal fee and the name was deleted, there's nothing they can do, and they certainly don't have any way to get the name back for you.
Given that reality, what other methods can you use to get your name back? You could sue the new registrant, but this is often a hugely complicated, time-consuming and costly affair, especially as the new registrant is just as likely to reside in Korea as in California. The two more practical methods are detailed below, these are:
- ICANN Arbitration and
- Domain Purchase.
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