Mar
23
GoDaddy Employee Offers To Sell Me Back My Own Domain For $1,000,000 - No… Not me. This was recently posted over at Namepros–originally story found at NewsTin–but the article lead to a dead link [to ICANN site]? Well… the article has been found (thank you, Google Cache). If you’re curious to see what it reads… carry on!
NewsTin Summary:
If someone steals something of value here in the states we call the police and they take a statement and initiate an investigation. Sometimes the property is recovered and the thief prosecuted. All this is undertaken without cost locally and without attorneys or empaneled “impartial” arbiters….
Article in full from ICANN–which is now a DEAD LINK!:
Submitted by jdurban on Fri, 2008-03-21 10:54.
* Domains
* Pay 10k for ICANN action or 1K to the thief that stole it…Tough call…Not!If someone steals something of value here in the states we call the police and they take a statement and initiate an investigation. Sometimes the property is recovered and the thief prosecuted. All this is undertaken without cost locally and without attorneys or empaneled “impartial” arbiters.
If however someone working at Godaddy a U.S. company steals a domain from a customer in the U.S. the victim can’t call the police because unlike all other thefts this one falls under some obscure remote little known foreign body located on the other side of the planet where really good chocolate comes from. Now here we have a U.S. crime and a U.S. victim yet the victim cannot remedy the crime in his or her own country. The process of recovering a stolen domain involves the hiring of an attorney that specializes in domain theft and bloated ICANN rules and procedures. This attorney will then send a warning letter to the offending basically requesting that they not continue their naughtiness and to return the stolen domain. If after some statutory period of time the crook fails to change his evil ways then the victim can escalate the process by paying ICANN to empanel a few objective justice seekers to take the helm. Now from here who knows what will transpire but the victim will wind up paying thousands of dollars to recover a ten dollar domain. There is something seriously wrong with this bizarre and counter intuitive process that needs to be completely revamped. Seriously could this goofy process be any more arcane or asinine? I think not. Sorry I am an engineer and I can’t seem to adapt to nonsensical impractical conditions. I always assume that systems evolve and improve according to a Darwinian like model. If Darwin was faced with recovering a stolen domain he would have shredded his works and let man know that his days were numbered as evolution would cease at the monolith called ICANN.
Jack Durban, victim of domain theft and ICANN ineptness and obsolescence.
Very powerful, right? Imagine something like this happens to you–and there IS a valid point being made here. Not 100% what the “actual” story is or if this was just made to get some attention (I’m sure there’s a story behind this), but seeing how people are starting to really take notice of the value of domain names (COUGH: SNOWE BILL, COUGH!)… we need to start being careful about our assetts.
Just posted this up since people were curious over at Namepros ;). Hopefully if there is a really unethical issue here it will now be noticed. GoDaddy has been doing some extremely shady business practices over the last month or so–according to what I’ve been reading.
Comments
4 Comments so far
Just to clarify things, the article was not published on NewsTin but on Icann.org site. NewsTin is a service that monitors and aggregates press .
Eeck yes. Forgot to mention it was originally spotted there, which is how we know about its existence.
Thank you for pointing that out.
Funny how fast internet news travels..it was I who originally posted that NamePros thread
Selling & Buying feeds me 
Researching domains is my passion
I’d be curious to know exactly what this guy meant by “stealing”. Unfortunately the vast majority of times some thinks their domain was “stolen” it actually turns out that they let it expire.