I have recently been a “victim” of the domain name tasting “scam”. A domain name (.COM) which is related to me personally (and which was owned by someone else previously) expired and as I knew from Whois (which is another debate on its own) that the expiry date was coming up, I kept a watch on when it would become available so I could register it. To cut a long story short, it took me nearly 6 weeks to get the domain.

Each time the domain dropped off the 5 day grace period (it is not really something that would generate ad revenue), it would be picked up by a different registrant, dropped again, picked up by another and so on. Of course they all had links on the domain’s default page inviting me to purchase it for a fee (or I had the option of using a domain registrar’s pre-buy service, at a premium over the normal domain registration price). I refused to take up either of these and persisted with my course of action of checking regularly.

After much research and analysis I came to the conclusion that, to get the domain name, I had to try and register at a time when the robots/scripts used by these dodgy registrants had not triggered. I found this time to be around 2 - 3 am West Coast USA time, and thus 6 weeks into my adventure I succeeded in registering the domain at 2:38am.

The issue, however, is that there seem to be a large set of registrars who are not playing the game as it should be played, with the rules that have been established, and are stretching beyond what is acceptable. Redemption grace periods are being manipulated and stretched beyond published guidelines (in my case over twice what was published).

All this has a bearing on the average Internet User, who for all intents and purposes, is not likely to have the background, nor the complete understanding, of how the domain name game works and will more likely than not, be unable to register a domain that they would like. And this ultimately leads down the path to disenfranchising Joe Average on the Internet, the very thing the Internet is not supposed to be about.