I don’t want to reveal the name right now because doing that would kind of make the previous owner “look bad”, let’s call it whatever.bla and leave it at that

So there I was, trying to come up with a name for one of my projects. I ended up going through some Sedo listings and found a tempting domain. I logged in and submitted a three figure offer. A couple of hours later, the owner gets back to me with a 4 figure asking price. I counter with a higher 3 figure offer. The owner gets back to me with a slightly lower asking price, still 4 figures, and I counter with the same 3 figure offer (along with Sedo’s “this is my final offer” standard comment). The owner doesn’t budge and counters with the same asking price along with a comment where he refers to some relevant past sales.

Since I wasn’t willing to pay that much for the domain, I started working on some stuff on my other computer and while I was taking a short break, I remembered the Sedo episode and decided to perform a whois search.

Surprise: The Person I Negotiated with Forgot to Renew!

I’m sure you can imagine how shocked I was. The owner handled everything perfectly, or so I thought: he got back to me with an asking price, then lowered it a bit but not too much (otherwise, he would have seemed desperate) and even provided past sales data to justify his attitude. Nothing wrong with this approach, he seemed like a domainer who knew what he was doing.

He did everything by the book… aside from the fact that he forgot to renew his domain and I managed to snag it for reg fee!

What He Should Have Done

There would have basically been two possibilities:

1) Renew it asap and then continue negotiating

Or, if he wouldn’t have been willing to risk “venturing into the unknown” (he would have only risked being stuck with the domain, obviously not a huge financial risk):

2) Accept my initial 3 figure offer and then quickly register the domain name: Sedo offers are always associated with a legally binding agreement and as a result, not paying him would have brought about the suspension of my Sedo account (I frequently buy as well as sell via Sedo and the owner had access to info related to my activity as a buyer, he saw that I’m a very active buyer and it wasn’t hard to tell that I wouldn’t have been willing to put my account at risk for a measly 3 figure amount)

So, What Have We Learned Today?

Two important lessons:

1) Always keep track of everything (if you’re going to drop a domain, it should be an informed decision and definitely not something which happened because you forgot that the domain existed)

2) If someone contacts you via Sedo because he’s interested in buying a domain name you no longer own and which is currently available, register it before he realizes that you accidentally forgot to renew and snatches it for reg fee

Look, if it were a simple “profits, profits, profits” situation (like with one letter .biz domains, for example), there would have been nothing negative to comment.  But there’s one huge difference between Neustar (the people “in charge” of dot biz and dot us) and DENIC: the german registry operates as a non-profit service provider. As a result, I have just one question for them:

Guys, What Were You Thinking?!

Here’s how things unfolded:

1) After the VW.de legal situation (VW won the domain in court), DENIC decided to let people register one character domains, two character domains, pure numeric domains and three character domains which were previously not available (com.de, for example)

2) It was obvious that people would be willing to pay top dollar for the newly introduced .de domains

3) DENIC could have helped a LOT of people if they would have done the smart thing by auctioning the domains themselves (TV.de went for $400,000 over at Sedo and that alone says a lot: there were millions of dollars/EUR on the table)

4) Ok, so there were obviously millions of dollars/EUR on the table. What did DENIC do? They set the table on fire by releasing them on a “first come – first served” basis!

5) Sedo jumped in and registrars started charging hefty fees (the natural reaction of a profit-driven market). The result: a handful of people ended up making a lot of money. End of story.

While it’s true that some companies will be donating a certain percentage of their earnings (and they definitely deserve credit for that), we’re talking about pocket change compared to the amount of money DENIC would have raised by auctioning the domains themselves.  Now someone from DENIC would probably offer an explanation similar to:

“It would have been complicated”

“There would have been a lot of technicalities involved”

“There would have been potential legal issues related to how the money is donated”

Dear DENIC, there comes a time in a person’s life when explanations aren’t worth squat. Maybe it would have been hard but you had the possibility to help thousands upon thousands of people by raising MILLIONS. Let me make myself perfectly clear:

You Should Have Made Things Happen. Period.

Stop for a second and imagine how much good you could do with $50,000,000. Now after doing that, do you still feel like listening to excuses? I didn’t think so.

Out of all possible solutions, DENIC chose the absolute worst. Think about all of the options:

1) Auction them yourself

2) So you wouldn’t be able to handle things technically? Ok, why not contact a few companies which would be able to help in exchange for some free press?

3) Is that also complicated? Alright, then just give Sedo 10% and let them take care of everything. That would leave you with 90%, not too shabby!

The list could go on and on and at the end of the day, we’re left with one question:

Who’s to Blame?

Sedo and the registrars for making a quick buck? Absolutely NOT! They’re profit-driven companies, they saw an opportunity and took action.

VW for suing them? Nope! Nobody forced DENIC to rush things.

DENIC? Yes! YES! YES!

The conclusion is (painfully) simple: Epic FAIL!

Why Did I Bother Writing This Post?

Anyone with half a brain will realize that other registries will also start releasing one and two character domains. Maybe next month, maybe next year but it’s obvious that it will happen again.

If the people behind at least ONE of them (one of the non-profit ones, profit-driven companies can obviously do whatever they want) read this, then I’m sure that the answer to the “why bother writing about this?” question is more than obvious.