r/domains

You can earn a sort of MBA for domains if you spend enough time in r/domains on Reddit¹.

Just in the past couple months we have “case studies” on:

1. ccTLD risk: Any strategic options for a clawed back domain?
2. Trademark law: Why didn’t Oreos company purchase Oreos.com?
3. Valuation: Half billion+$ company wants a domain I have
4. Leasing domains: Domain redirect renting?

It’s not all high quality, of course (see: “What’s with all the garbage posted in this subreddit?”). You have to be a discerning reader, of course. You don’t trust everything you read on Reddit the same way you don’t trust everything a language model tells you. Upvotes and downvotes help screen what’s legitimate.

So let’s pick one case study. I think “Any strategic options for a clawed back domain?” is most interesting. It teaches us a lesson about the risks of buying a domain from a country that can take it back at any moment—a phenomenon I’ve called eminent domains.

Eminent domains

Just as the US government can seize private land for public use under eminent domain law, any government can seize a domain anytime.

A couple months ago, someone posted a screenshot of an email from Porkbun on r/domains along with this caption:

TL;DR, I bought an incredibly tiny domain I wanted to use as part of a company-wide ecosystem for URL shorteners, email addresses, and file vanity links. Including TLD, the domain had four characters total; advertised as $3.

Fast forward 5 days, I get this email. It was clawed back citing an error and allegedly should have been valued at $7K...Do I even have any options for protecting this and getting it back?

The country is redacted, so we don’t know who to blame. Here’s the meat of that Porkbun email:

We regret to inform you that the registry service provider for .◾️◾️ domains has recalled your recent registration of co.◾️◾️. The registry claims that the price shown for this two-letter domain was an error and that it should’ve been listed as a premium registration valued at over $7,000.

While we believe the situation is entirely the fault of the registry and its service provider and we disagree with their decision, they are unfortunately within their rights to carry out a recall of this nature.

Does OP “have any options for protecting this and getting it back?” The short answer is no, probably not. Country-owned ccTLDs are not bound by ICANN’s bylaws the same way gTLDs are. From a top 1% commenter on the subreddit:

For ccTLDs, ICANN’s policy is pretty much "do as you please" and they can do this without any registrant recourse. ccTLDs are very high risk.

This risk has bitten domain owners many times before: with .ly domains from Libya, .af domains from Afghanistan, .sy domains from Syria, and so on. Another commenter suggested lawyering up, but the more-upvoted response tells us that OP is SOL.

Registrar here. CcTLDs are subject to the law of the respective country. You’d need to take legal action in that country against its government. OP would be looking at $100k minimum for a snowflake's chance in hell.

Porkbun ended up issuing a refund and a $100 credit for the registrant’s troubles. Porkbun is a fan favorite registrar among developer friends I talk to, and this email adds a point in their favor as a trustworthy registrar. Or many points:

This email made me like porkbun even more.

...

The response from porkbun is such good customer service.

...

IMHO good response by porkbun for a very shitty situation that they didn’t cause...Confirms that I made a good choice to move my domains to them.

The registrar reputation world must be zero-sum because GoDaddy caught a stray in the middle of the Porkbun praise: "GoDaddy is known [to] buy domains you are searching." I don’t know if there’s hard evidence of GoDaddy doing this, but they definitely do have their own portfolio, and I’ve heard that claim before.

ccTL;DR

The only recourse to a ccTLD case like this seems to be fighting it publicly with bad press, which I guess I’m doing here except that we don’t know which country is the culprit.

The best you can do is write an angry blog post and hope they get bullied into giving you the domain.

So what country is this? One commenter hinted, “I’m almost certain I can guess which ccTLD this is, as they recently had a change in registry management (rights to manage the ccTLD were sold and the new management have been hiking up prices).” I have a couple ideas as to who this could be, but OP decided to redact the ccTLD “due to WHOIS privacy not being active,” so I’ll respect their wishes here.

When it comes to eminent domains, buyer beware.

Footnotes

(1) You can learn a lot by lurking in a subreddit. You can learn even more by answering questions in that subreddit (or any online forum, really). When someone asks a question that you don’t know the answer to, look it up and figure it out, answer, then you know. "When one teaches, two learn."