
How I finally won my name from domain resellers after nine years of waiting - jerryalex
https://jerryalex.com/how-i-finally-won-my-name-from-domain-squatters-after-9-years-of-waiting/
======
kylecazar
Timely. Not very relevant, but I just sold a domain I've owned for 5 years
after being contacted by GoDaddy's brokerage service about an interested
buyer.

It was actually cathartic for me -- not only did I realize that I may seem
like the squatter to someone else in this situation, but it forced me to come
to terms with the fact that I won't be working on that idea, ever.

~~~
markdown
> it forced me to come to terms with the fact that I won't be working on that
> idea, ever.

I think this is a feeling so many people working in the web sphere have to
contend with at some point.

~~~
hermitdev
I had this, myself. I had a similarly named domain in the early 2000s. I
think, technically, I was there first, and I had my name registered as a combo
of a gaming tag + "tech" in the domain name. If I had more resources, maybe I
could have secured the name, but they jad had a full company, and I wad just
exploring amd didnt have anything commercial in the works.

I decided to just let it go and let my domain expire. I didnt approach the
company to try and sell it, just let it expire. I wasn't squatting, amd I
intended to use it, but the purpose didn't materialize, so I let it go. I
never had any communication from the similarly named company; I dont even know
if theyre still around. I just didnt renew when my time expired.

------
zamadatix
I settled on ds.gy after a lot of searching. At the time I was hoping for as
short as possible unless you operate a domain (it's one letter off for
standard, 2 if you operate a 2 letter TLD like [http://ai./](http://ai./))
since it maximizes the efficiency of DNS tunneling. I was expecting a lot of
similar uses or a log of clever things/url shortners like t.co but what I
found was basically every single and most every dual letter domain was being
squatted. Made me a little sad until I saw one that matched my initials and
decided that was good enough.

~~~
mark-r
There's a reasonably large public company that has the name of my initials, so
I never had a chance with that one. I do have two friends who were much more
forward thinking and managed to get their 3 initial .com domains early enough
before they were gobbled up.

I also tried to get my full name, but that was already taken too. He's a
performer so it's probably in better hands but that doesn't lessen my
disappointment much.

~~~
kadoban
Aren't 3 letter domains worth a fairly insane amount of money? Did they sell
them?

~~~
mark-r
No, they both still have them. They're unusual enough that I doubt they'd be
worth the kind of money you're thinking.

------
flurdy
I have way too many domain names, but I like it. I have several .uk, .no and
.com for my own name, e.g. firstname.tld or firstnamelastname.tld. All
redirecting to my main site.

For the first decade or two that was fine as usually the first page or two on
a Google search of my name was all me. Very vain. Though I think there are
many that shares my Norwegian name, most were not early internet adopters.

However in the last few years, some of the people that also share my name have
started to creep up the search result, i.e. they have been covered in news
articles or websites of their own. I have now started to feel guilty for
hogging all the good domain names. If one of them reach out I would probably
hand one of the domain names over at cost or share it somehow.

Though recently I have "reclaimed" some of the first page on Google as the
search now states the infamous "Some results may have been removed under data
protection law in Europe" at the bottom. Someone did not want to be infamous.
Wasn't me, honest.

I also feel slightly guilty for the few Irish people that have my username as
their firstname. Sorry, but I am keeping those domain names.

~~~
ryanmercer
>However in the last few years, some of the people that also share my name
have started to creep up the search result, i.e. they have been covered in
news articles or websites of their own. I have now started to feel guilty for
hogging all the good domain names. If one of them reach out I would probably
hand one of the domain names over at cost or share it somehow.

Similar for me. I have RyanMercer.net .com .co.uk and almost 18 years of blog
posts there but this guy in Canada had a fashion show a couple years ago and
he comes up frequently now, and another 'name brother' in Canada was a kid
with cancer and articles about him come up frequently, and of course the
journalist in Vermont (haha so some girl matched me on Tinder last year and
goes "I used to work for a Ryan Mercer!" and it was the journalist, also for
years I would occasionally get email for him, his email address has an
additional character where mine does not, I once got his wired.com credentials
because whoever set them up omitted the character, as well as many of his
assignments from employers, I also got medical and paystub info for one in the
UK for the better part of a year, one in Georgia I get hotel
reservations/appointment reminders/sometimes receipts for semi-regularly
too...).

I also discovered recently someone bought THEryanmercer.com.

I however feel no guilt at all about owning the domains. I owned .net first (I
don't know why I got it instead of .com first) and then grabbed the .com,
being an Anglophile at some point I picked up the .co.uk just because. I
always try to get ryanmercer on any social media service too, sadly by the
time I got to twitter someone else had and had abandoned the account early on.

------
cyborgx7
I had some luck with a .de domain of my name that was being squatted.

There are some judgements in Germany that say you have a special right to the
domain with your name, and it's not just first come first serve. I don't
remember what exactly I did because it happened a while ago. But it involved
sending a physical letter to Denic pointing out that this was domain was my
name. I never heard back, but when I checked in a while later, the domain was
free for the taking and I bought it.

I assume this only worked because it was a squatter and not someone else with
the same name.

------
lioeters
Good for you! I enjoyed reading about your persistence and eventual triumph,
knowing how shady the business of domain squatting is.

> Generally, these auctions will drive up the price by bidding on their own
> domains to get you to pay more.

This practice feels like a form of fraud, but I guess it's not against any
law..?

> I had also initially setup the script to auto-purchase the domain, but that
> failed due to Namecheap not recognizing the domain availability in time.

Interesting to hear this, as I was curious about using their API to automate
domain purchasing as part of a larger web service. I imagine they cache
results and refresh periodically, which is good enough for most purposes.

~~~
davinic
Shill bidding is illegal in most places, and if not, would definitely be under
the fraud umbrella, although IANAL.

------
AnthonyMouse
Can someone explain why there isn't a rule that if you let a domain lapse then
it stops working, but you have a year to renew it again before anybody else
can buy it?

Even if you really didn't want it anymore and somebody else did (and didn't
want to wait the year), they could always just ask/pay you for it.

~~~
unreal37
I mean, there's like 40 days to renew a domain once it expires. So you want to
extend 40 days to 365? [1]

The thing is, if you forgot to renew your domain, and didn't do it even 40
days after the expiry date, are you going to do it 365 days after?

I think 40 days is a lot of time to check your email and see 20 emails from
your registrar screaming at you to renew...

[1] [https://www.dynadot.com/community/help/question/renewal-
grac...](https://www.dynadot.com/community/help/question/renewal-grace-period)

~~~
AnthonyMouse
> I think 40 days is a lot of time to check your email and see 20 emails from
> your registrar screaming at you to renew...

Apparently it isn't when so many people have it happen to them that there is a
profitable business in registering the names right after they expire in order
to sell them back to the original owners.

And there are a lot of domains, especially for personal use, that you might
not notice disappear right away. The registrar has your old email that you
don't check very often, the domain is for a low-traffic site you don't check
very often, it takes a while for you to realize it. Meanwhile I can't see any
legitimate _disadvantage_ in it at all -- what's the big rush to assign the
name to somebody else without the original owner's permission?

Also:

> Some domain extensions do not offer renewal and/or redemption periods or
> offer them for different lengths of time.

------
sergiotapia
Some bottom feeder stole my personal domain after I let it lapse and is now
literally holding it hostage for $6000 last I checked.
[http://sergiotapia.me/](http://sergiotapia.me/)

I just bought sergio.dev, the squatter can choke on my old domain.

~~~
prawn
If you let it lapse, is "stole" a bit strong? I'd think "stole" would be
getting your login/email and transferring the domain away while you had it
registered?

~~~
reaperducer
It's more like you dropped your wallet on the street and the guy walking
behind you picked it up and won't give it back unless you pay him.

~~~
kbenson
No, it's more like you accidentally put something out on the street by your
trash and someone came by and picked it up. Just because you got rid of it on
accident doesn't mean you didn't get rid of it.

And to forestall arguments about that being someone's property, trash on the
street is considered public property in many (most?) jurisdictions, which is
why the police don't need a warrant to go through it.

Edit: and there are ways that this gets slimy too. I'm not debating the maral
ramifications of this, just whether it fits the common definition of stealing.
It's less theft and more more someone looking for people's small mistakes and
making a living my making them very costly for those people. Morally bankrupt,
but not illegal. Like the person who drives around looking for ADA compliance
issues with businesses so they can sue them, not to make the situation better
but just to extract money. Not illegal, but pretty despicable when done for
personal gain.

------
ElijahLynn
If it was 9 years, then the squatters definitely won.

~~~
kylec
No one won. The squatters lost money, the guy lost time.

~~~
segfaultbuserr
I don't know about Game Theory, but is it correct to call this outcome a Nash
Equilibrium?

Edit: I thought about it for a while, and it seems incorrect to say so. If the
buyer's strategy is "always wait", and the seller's strategy is "always sell
at an outrageous price", it should be a Nash Equilibrium, similar to a
Prisoner's dilemma. But the buyer's strategy is actually "buy if the price is
reasonable, wait if not", so the broker can always choose to lower the price
to a reasonable level, both allowing the blogger to purchase the domain name,
and profits from it. But the broker doesn't appear to be rational enough to
choose this strategy, possible due to stupidity or limitations of the business
model. What is the suitable term for this phenomenon?

------
cm2187
Don't know if one can call that "domain squatting", but it's worth buying
young kids a domain after their name while it is still available. The chance
that it will be useful to them one day is pretty high.

~~~
notzuck
Pretty high? Even most of my nerd friends don't have their own name
registered.

------
bashwizard
I was in a similiar situation where I have the same name, spelling and all as
a very famous person in my country. So this person had the .com domain and I
waited 7 years for it to be dropped and eventually the person switched to our
country's domain instead.

------
epakai
I had a domain 2004-2006 for an online alias. I was in high school and it was
just for fun. Not even valuable or interesting. I let it lapse intentionally,
but then it was held by somebody for 10 years.

They finally dropped it in 2014 and someone else who had taken up the nickname
registered it in 2016. I had mostly given up on the name anyway because I had
collisions on a few services with 1 or 2 people using the same.

Seems so silly to hold a domain like that. Shit for traffic. Hosted only
hobbyist/personal content (easily verifiable on archive.org). I certainly
wasn't going to shell out anything even if I could find who was holding it.
They did have a contact/interest form at some points during those 10 years,
but I know there were times when there was nothing. I avoided contact because
I expected showing interest in it would prolong their hold or just result in a
stupid price. Just a dead domain.

------
iKevinShah
I might be late at this discussion but does anyone know how to I can win my
domain name back from Yahoo Small Business?

Back Story: In 2005, when I was new to Computing world, I searched for "Free
domain" and something led to another and Yahoo at the time bought the domain
(while it seemed I would have to pay later). I did not use it and tried to see
it in 2012 again, turns out someone was indeed using it (had same name), fair
enough but now the domain is back with yahoo and I can not contact them at
all. I tried their customer care [1], no reply. Also tried their forums, no
reply. Cant get them on call either.

Any suggestions?

1:
[https://help.smallbusiness.yahoo.net/s/](https://help.smallbusiness.yahoo.net/s/)

------
yonran
Have any TLDs attempted to implement a property tax on domains according to
value to reduce cyber squatting? To implement a property tax, Glen Weyl and
Eric Posner have proposed using self-assessment so that users pay what they
want
([https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2818494](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2818494)
and [https://www.amazon.com/Radical-Markets-Uprooting-
Capitalism-...](https://www.amazon.com/Radical-Markets-Uprooting-Capitalism-
Democracy/dp/0691177503/))

~~~
oh_sigh
I don't understand how you can ever have a just society if society can deem at
any point that your property is too valuable for you to hold anymore. Of
course they happens in society today, but I don't see how making it easier for
property to be forcibly reallocated would help create a more just society.

~~~
yonran
Do you realize that the reason the squatter abandoned the domain (instead of
keeping it forever) is the $8/year registry fee? My question is why should the
squatter pay only $8 per year, and not, say, $50?

~~~
pests
Why should they pay $50? What are you charging for above cost of service?

~~~
yonran
When speculators hold onto domain names without using them, their right to
exclude imposes a cost on the other member of society who wishes to use the
property productively. So like progressive property taxes in general, a domain
tax should be high enough not only to pay for the direct cost of services, but
also to discourage idle speculators and encourage owners to use the domain
productively.

------
kkarakk
I don't think name as domain is important anymore since it's pretty much a
numbers game - it is unlikely you'll get your name as a .com domain(the only
domain that matters if you want more than a toy website) is going to either be
squatted on or already occupied.

There needs to be some sort of TLD with authentication. Let's call it .name
You only get .name if you do a KYC/register with the government.In case of
collision you get bidding wars, however the money goes to a non profit
internet charity. Instant SEO and a guarantee that you actually get to have a
web presence without gatekeeping.

~~~
vidarh
Of course there is actually a ".name". I co-founded the company that set it
up, and the original idea was to share the second level so you'd get full
control over firstname.lastname.name with e-mail forwarding from [first
name]@[last name].name. This followed an e-mail service (Nameplanet) we set up
when two of us were discussing how we were both basically blocking a whole
[lastname].[tld] domain for ourselves.

Unfortunately .name largely proved too hard to communicate quickly enough, and
meanwhile it's clear that people for the most part don't mind weird addresses
and/or don't have an issue with seeing e-mail addresses as transient. Which I
find quite weird, given I've had the same e-mail address for 20 years at this
point. Today .name is operated by Verisign, and second level registrations
were enabled years ago, and I do occasionally see them, but the original
concept really was part of a wave of people talking about "digital identities"
on the net that just died off, in part I think because it seems most of the
time peoples identity is much more fluid outside of very official
circumstances. E.g. you don't necessarily always want your e-mail address to
give away your full name, or your name at all, and in the more formal contexts
(e.g. work) you often have another e-mail address anyway and/or your e-mail
address is not an important element.

Incidentally, in retrospect I wonder if ".nom" or ".nym" or one of the other
proposed names would have been (marginally) easier - people often hear ".name"
and think it's a placeholder for _a_ name, especially when you try to explain
that your e-mail address is [your first name]@[your last name].name. I use my
.com of the same format, and it seems to lead to fewer questions than when I
also had/used my .name.

~~~
kenneth
My email is my [first]@[last].com. I constantly have to explain to people that
I am indeed saying [first]@[last].com and not [first].[last]@gmail.com. Ughh.

Still, worth it. I love my email address!

~~~
mxuribe
I have the same thing, and it gets really annoying when your TLD is not, say,
.net/.org/.com, and you're interacting with non-tech-savvy people like in your
local municipal office, etc. It's funny how so many people assume that your
email will be something@gmail or something@yahoo...But then you ask them how
their work email is structured, and then they respond: oh, yeah, i never
thought private people would have their own email addresses!" I would expect
this in the early 2000s, but now in 2019!?! It's surprising and annoying -
because you have to spend extra seconds explaining stuff to people, and
getting them to "believe you" that, yes, that is my personal email address.

~~~
TurkTurkleton
I have $FIRSTNAME@$LASTNAME.me. Not only do I get people being like "...dot me
...dot com?" when I speak it aloud, I've actually encountered one municipal
government whose email address validation _actually rejects it_. Thank
goodness I also have $NICKNAME$LASTNAME.com, although that has its own
problems ($LASTNAME[0] == "Y" and $NICKNAME has a common hypocoristic form
ending in "y", so people sometimes misread it as ${NICKNAME}y$LASTNAME.com).

------
rudiv
I have solved this by cunningly being born outside of the anglosphere. I own
my first name domain in my native language's script (.com) as well as in Latin
(.dev, my people are too plentiful for me to have got the . com).

------
xtiansimon
My first domain name was my full name (never occurred to me to look for my
initials). Then maybe a year after I was able to get the full name of my
brothers and mom and dad and gave this as a holiday gift. After a year they
let them expire. :p

I have a few domains for projects I want to do. Unfulfilled dream squatting.
But for me the thrill of buying domains was always to nab that hip domain
name. Some favorites—which I never owned but wish I did:
JoanieLovesChachi.com, Superbad.com. Hahah makes me laugh every time.

------
sireat
Curious on what experienced domain buyers would suggest in my case.

After many years of procrastination I decided to see how much would it cost to
purchase myfirstname.com (about 5k people in the world have this name).

Turns out it is impossible to even enquire on purchasing this domain.

The domain is not being used.

Archive.org shows 3 hits in the last 15 years, all minimal parked pages, last
hit being 2013.

Domain registration is private. My whois-fu is rather weak.

So what can I do to contact the owner?

Some big name reseller is just sitting on this name for 10+ years and waiting
for who knows what.

~~~
diet_mtn_dew
You can either contact them through the privatized email in their whois info,
or use a domain name broker who will attempt to purchase it on your behalf. I
have never used one myself, but have had them email me about buying my
domains.

------
segfaultbuserr
Still waiting to get mine. I registered my first domain name from my national
provider, and always wanted to move the domain aboard to the U.S. or a
European registrar, however, the bureaucratic process of initializing a
transfer is ridiculous. It's not an important domain name, so I decided to
take the risk and allow the domain to expire, so I could re-register it.
Unfortunately, the dropped domain was instantly caught by a broker.

Waiting mode...

------
orliesaurus
Good for you Jerry! I hope I never forget my renewal myself! Luckily I use
Gandi as a registrar and they're good about reminders to their clients!

~~~
saagarjha
I have Google Domains autorenew my domain for me. Does Gandi have something
similar?

~~~
icebraining
I think auto-renewal is quite universal nowadays; the problem is keeping the
payment method up to date!

------
nathan_f77
I would like to get nathanbroadbent.com one day. The only problem is that the
current owner is also named Nathan Broadbent, and they're also a software
developer and startup founder. (This has caused some confusion a few times,
such as identity verification for a bank, and during an interview with US
immigration.)

ndbroadbent.com will do for now!

------
mruts
My domain name was mentioned in a bunch of publications associated with a very
famous national treason case. I’ve tried to get them to edit the articles to
remove it as there’s no real journalistic value in it and just hurts me.

Sucks to have a domain I’ve used for over 10 years for email and stuff to be
rendered unusable by bad press.

------
outworlder
This is great and all unless your domain drops and it is caught by something
like dropcatch.com or competitors.

~~~
jerryalex
It was caught by dropcatch actually. I didn't bid in the auction though.
Eventually it was released.

~~~
morenoh149
sounds like you didn't want the domain?

~~~
jmts
This is addressed in the article. He wanted the domain, but didn't want to pay
more than necessary for it. This includes avoiding an auction that could
unnecessarily inflate the price.

------
drewroberts
Took me a while to get mine. Glad more people can avoid the John Malkovich
problem:

[https://youtu.be/vNInrUkctc4](https://youtu.be/vNInrUkctc4)

[https://youtu.be/YjzYaLxplbw](https://youtu.be/YjzYaLxplbw)

------
bhartzer
There is a big difference between domain squatting and domain investing. Or
simply buying domains that drop.

I don’t understand how you can say that it’s “domain squatting” on “your” name
if you don’t own a trademark on the word or on your name. As others have
pointed out, there may be other people who have the same name as you. How is
it your name versus their name? My definition of domain squatting is buying a
domain name that already has a trademark on it. The “rule” states that even if
a word has a trademark, if someone bought the domain before the tm holder
applied for the tm, then the domain owner still can own the domain. As long as
it was not registered in bad faith.

The key here is “bad faith”.

Python scripts are no longer necessary to grab expired domains, that’s what
backorder services are for. I recommend backordering the names of all your
current sites just in case you fail to renew the name. Backorder it on
multiple services, as it truly is a race to see which service gets it.

------
slowhand09
I remember in the early-mid 1990's, we print (yes print) the entire list of
register domains and laugh at the big company names NOT in the list.

------
charlesdm
Would you mind sharing how much they actually wanted for it?

Are we talking 9 years of waiting, vs $500, or 9 years of waiting, vs $10,000?

Regardless, congrats on getting it back.

~~~
OJFord
Says $1500 in the post.

~~~
charlesdm
Sorry, I missed that -- cheers!

------
unreal37
I think a lot of people don't know what "domain squatting" is.

If there's a domain you want, but someone else has it but is not using it,
that's not squatting. If you let your personal name domain expire, and someone
else registers it, that's not squatting.

In order for it to be squatting, they have to be trying to profit off a
trademark. I assume Jerry Alex is not a trademark.

"Cybersquatting (also known as domain squatting), according to the United
States federal law known as the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act, is
registering, trafficking in, or using an Internet domain name with bad faith
intent to profit from the goodwill of a trademark belonging to someone else.
The cybersquatter then offers to sell the domain to the person or company who
owns a trademark contained within the name at an inflated price. "
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybersquatting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybersquatting)

~~~
twhb
People know full well what they're talking about: holding domains for profit,
not any crime, not domain underuse, not domain snatching. That may not be the
legal definition of "domain squatting", but neither are the common and legal
definitions the same for "brief", "motion", or "harassment". US law narrowing
a term doesn't make common use wrong.

~~~
unreal37
I get that people misuse words sometimes, and occasionally the definition of
those words changes to match the common use.

But still, squatting is not "someone bought a domain that used to be mine. And
when I asked to buy it back, the price was not what I was willing to pay."
It's not.

------
techntoke
I personally think that some engineers should just help create some dockerized
name servers that can be deployed and do away with ICANN altogether, that way
you can have your own TLD without paying $15,000+ dollars a year.

~~~
kortex
It kind of amazes me that we cannot resolve arbitrary strings as TLD's. Yeah
let the .com's and country codes get locked down by the regs, but there's an
almost-nowhere-dense space of strings.

I guess the hard part is in resolving contention over particularly desirable
strings.

------
14
After reading this I thought what the heck let’s see if I can grab my name.
For 15$ I now own my name at a .ca domain. I know I need to find a host I
think but literally have no website experience or idea what I need to do next
lol.

~~~
sumedh
A .com is more valuable than .ca

~~~
techsupporter
I disagree. If the person is Canadian and the domain isn't for a "generic
brand," then no, I'd actually say that .ca is more valuable than .com. It
makes the name more personal to the individual and, in an industry where a lot
of us have our own domains, uniqueness can be more valuable.

~~~
sumedh
Op's comment says the .com is for 3500 USD so the market thinks a .com is more
valuable.

~~~
dwild
Theses prices are arbitrary. When I was able to get a credit card, the first
thing I tried was to buy my username domain name, obviously, the .com was my
priority. At the time it was 8k CAD, the .net was a bit better at 1.6k CAD.

Both were renewed at first but the second time .net didn't get renewed, unlike
OP it didn't get into an auction (I don't think it was usual in 2011) and I
just had to wait until the expiration delay was up and I got it.

Now the .com is worth 38 618,96$ CAD. There's no reason for an inflation that
high for the past 8 years. No one needs that domain. I never received any
request for mine. Except the fact that it contains "wild" inside, it's pretty
much useless for much.

It's not at all related to any market, it's arbitrary.

