Last night I came across a post by ‘RicoShay’ on Namepros titled “Government of India just took my domain!!?” I know that this member is a well respected domainer and I got curious. It looks like the Indian Government used the 12th clause (below) in it’s Terms and Conditions for Registrants to justify the transfer of an LLL.in (letter letter letter) domain out of the registrants account.
12. Reservation of Rights for the .IN Registry: The .IN Registry
reserves the right to instruct its Registry Services Provider to deny,
cancel, transfer or otherwise make unavailable any registration that
it deems necessary or place any domain name(s) on registry lock
and/or put a domain name on hold in its discretion: (1) to protect
the integrity and stability of .IN Registry; (2) to comply with any
applicable laws, Indian government rules or requirements, requests
of law enforcement, in compliance with any dispute resolution
process; (3) to avoid any liability, civil or criminal, on the part of the
.IN Registry, as well as its affiliates, subsidiaries, officers, directors,
representatives and employees; (4) for violations of this
Agreement; or (5) to correct mistakes made by the Registry or any
Registrar in connection with a domain name registration. The
Registry also reserves the right to freeze a domain name during
resolution of a dispute pending before arbitrator(s) appointed under
Registry?s Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy and/or a court
of competent jurisdiction.
One would assume that the Gov’t of India would be part of the registration/release of the .in domains and would also stake their claim to domains they feel necessary before they ever become available for registration right?? Guess not. This is an unfortunate case for the registrant since he spent many multiples of the registration fee to purchase the domain on the aftermarket and the name’s value is far beyond what he bought it for. I don’t believe this is the first time it’s happened either, I vaguely remember a story like this maybe a year back but I could not dig it up.
Should .in domain holders be worried now about the security of their domains? Probably not since this hasn’t been a commonly reported practice since the .in registry launched in 2005. I only own a handful of .in domains but I will admit this news is a little startling to me since I have a couple LLL.in domains with very common letters.
Just wondering what the three LLL are