Reminded me of a Planet Money podcast episode with the milk.com owner, who also had early internet years domains. Fun listen if people are interested. [0]

[0] https://www.npr.org/2025/09/03/nx-s1-5526903/domain-name-val...

I tried to register a domain like acme.stream through Cloudflare Registrar and it asked me to affirm I had Acme Widgets Corp.'s permission [edit: I might be wrong about this part, since I'm in a totally different niche, but the pop-up freaked me out]. I went with a different domain.

>But this was early on for domains and I wonder what the process is like now.

UDRP:

https://www.icann.org/en/contracted-parties/consensus-polici...

This has been my understanding. I was told by lawyer in in th 90's that it would be described as squatting in court.

Never be intimidated by a trademark. Especially, if your domain is older than the trademark. Even if it isn't, there are many trademark classes.

Are you allowed to share how much (roughly) you sold it for?

Not sure about the legal theory behind domains and intent to sell, but fact-wise my defense would be that I consider all of my assets to be for sale, the only difference is the price, so they would have to prove that my 'intent to sell' was significant enough. At the very least price would have needed to be discussed.

A reply said this, but it's dead:

>If you're offering it for sale, you're clearly not using it for commerce. [...]

>if you're selling a domain and someone has a trademark for it, you should have to hand it over. Hell, I'd argue that should apply even without a trademark [...]

I disagree, but they made a point and did so clearly.

Why that person felt someone else's chosen commercial use of a domain should trump anyone's non-commercial (or less commercial) use, I don't know.

All business assets are for sale at the right price, right? Even whilst living by the business at a particular domain, I'd have sold that domain for £200k, probably a lot less. Same as for any business asset, even (especially?) those in commercial use.

full disclaimer, I have worked on https://udrp.tools for something like a decade now as the developer. We're working on an AI chatbot to help answer these types of questions based on our dataset and other data sources (actual wipo guidelines, udrpperspectives.org). The short answer is no, the answer our AI gave with citations/explanation is below if youre curious:

Does publicly listing a domain for sale mean you'd automatically lose a UDRP arbitration if someone has a trademark for it?

No. A public sale listing is not an automatic loss. Here's how panels actually decide these cases.

The controlling rule

Bad faith based on a sale offer requires that the domain was registered primarily for the purpose of selling to the trademark owner (or a competitor) for more than out-of-pocket costs. Two things must be true at once: (1) the primary purpose of registration was to sell, and (2) the target was that specific trademark holder. A generic public listing on Sedo or Afternic doesn't automatically satisfy either requirement. (WIPO Overview 3.1; UDRP Perspectives 3.5)

What panels actually look at

No single factor decides it. Panels weigh all of these:

How distinctive is the trademark? A coined word like KODAK is treated very differently from a generic term like CLOUD.

Did the registrant plausibly know about the mark when registering? Famous marks raise this inference; obscure marks don't.

Was the offer directed at the trademark owner specifically, or listed publicly for any buyer?

Does the asking price only make sense if the trademark owner is the buyer, or is it consistent with general market prices?

Does the registrant hold a broader portfolio of generic/descriptive domains, or a collection of brand-matching ones?

Was the domain registered after the mark became well-known, or before?

Is there a credible non-trademark reason to want the domain?

Things that do NOT automatically mean bad faith

Listing a domain publicly for sale (UDRP Perspectives 3.5)

Asking a high price (UDRP Perspectives 3.5; WIPO Overview 3.1.1)

Even reaching out to the trademark owner directly — panels look at whether multiple parties were approached and whether the registration was brand-specific (UDRP Perspectives 3.5)

Wanting to profit — legitimate domain investing is a recognized lawful activity under UDRP (UDRP Perspectives 2.6)

When the calculus shifts against you

The harder cases are where the domain is identical to a highly distinctive coined brand, there's no plausible use for the domain other than trading on the trademark, and the asking price is only realistic for the trademark owner itself. In those cases panels have found bad faith even without a direct approach to the owner. A notable example is the three-member panel majority in WIPO case D2022-1570, which found that the asking price implied the complainant was the only conceivable buyer — though a dissent disagreed, illustrating that even these edge cases are not automatic.

Bottom line

The outcome depends on: how famous and distinctive the mark is, whether you had it in your sights at registration, whether there's a credible independent reason to want the domain, and who you're actually marketing it to. Generic terms with multiple plausible buyers, listed publicly, have repeatedly survived UDRP challenges. (UDRP Perspectives 3.5) Coined-brand matches with sky-high asking prices and no other credible use have not.

> I shouldn't offer it for sale as that would show the arbitration board that I don't need the domain. [...] So I could keep the domain but not use it for commerce...

If you're offering it for sale, you're clearly not using it for commerce. I'm sure if you finished you game and offered it for sale on that domain, you'd be fine. You're actually using it and in a non-infringing way.

So yes, if you're selling a domain and someone has a trademark for it, you should have to hand it over. Hell, I'd argue that should apply even without a trademark, but alas...

A bit tangential but I imagine some of the smart folks here might have interesting opinions on this. There are a few sites popping up that let you do something interesting with content at a given url by changing the domain name slightly.

The best example is changing the g in github.com to u.

That results in uithub.com making the data there LLM friendly. Is that considered infringement?

Thank you, for a moment I wondered why a specification was being written by AI.

You’ve just described registry premium domains. The .com registry operator is bound by a bunch of pricing restrictions but that’s not true for most other registry operators. And so, registry premium pricing was invented to defeat domain investors by making desirable domains more expensive. Want to register chat.now? That’s $5,000/year. Ai.now is $20k/year.

Sounds like a great way to have larger competitors with more capital bid for your site to take down your domain that your users were using. Rather than Land Value Tax a better analogy might be a Vacant Property Tax which only targets squatting.

Pay 2-5% to who? That's the problem for me - usually this means just another way to expand government. If you would just distribute it equally to all relevant citizens, with none of it going to the government, then I might get on board.

..so? It’s better than what we have now

Domain names are a mess in my opinion. Even though we have over a thousand TLDs only a very small handful are considered for commerce or even thought to be valid.

I have a domain name with the TLD of "today". Many people think my email is [email]@[domain].today.com. It's not just the common person's fault but also software engineers / product managers who still have a very restrictive view of what a TLD is (under 3 three letters is the primary restriction I hit).

Since I don't believe we'll ever convince people that domains longer than 3 letters / full words are TLDs, I think the solution is every human being gets 10 domain names at marketprice then every domain ownership above that gets graduated ownership costs; the first year is market, second year is $100, third year is $500, fourth year is $1,000, and so on until the 10th year where it levels out at $10k per year.

The idea of it being if you want to hold onto a lot of domains you need to pay for it or make the domains economically viable. With what is essentially infinite space, we shouldn't be allowing domains to be like finite real world real estate to be speculated on.

Imagine if AOL keywords had stuck around.

Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37416005

I'm wondering if this can be used to hunt down squatters and take domains from them, for example, if they have the domain marked as for sale in DNS, while also renewing the domain. If a renewal happens while someone has a domain listed for sale, they should give up all rights to that domain and it should go back on the open market for a sane price.

Like a lot of things, society would probably benefit if we had caps on how much a single entity could own.

Do you have any domains that you purchased with the intention to use and haven't been able to use them yet?

And what is the definition of a domain squatter?

The concern is if you own a domain that you don’t own the trademark for.

Twitter owned both the domain and all trademarks so it’s a non issue.

Basically in fairly limited circumstances you can have your domain taken off you if someone else holds a matching trademark. Saying you are selling it can go some way to demonstrating you are not holding it in good faith.

This probably means that meeting the minimum price does not guarantee that you would be able to buy it due to other (probably opaque) criteria. For example, the seller might not want to sell to you/your company in particular, but is open to other people/companies.

I can have something for sale without an obligation to sell it (depending on offer terms, including price).

Interesting, a binding bid might be more useful than this proposed no-op slop.

TLDs like .online actually have a registrar-based dynamic pricing system based on internal rules, like domain size, presence in word lists, plurality, etc... And their distribution of available to taken names is quite good. It's different, which is already good, no one needs yet another TLD with the uncreative allocation system of copying the .com, we need variety, and I feel a binding DNS based offer system might make for a aftermarket-based continuation of the successful .online experiment.

But if the offer is not binding, then it's just an advertisement, no consideration, no contract, unlikely to amount to anything materially different than a 'domain for sale' HTML pages. In fact, if the HTML page has a buy now button, it's effectively an offer that can be accepted just by clicking the buttons and inputting cc info, so it's even better than a non binding DNS record.

Also, let's stop using TXT for everyone, why is everyone such a pussy about actually using record types? Do we really need every tool to be compliant out of the box? What's wrong with forcing vendors that want to be compliant to actually write like 20 lines of code and formally implementing support for the feature?

Initial underscore is a reserved namespace for this reason.

Country code TLDs would be one reason. Many countries reserve top-level domains names and only sell second-level domains (e.g. example.co.uk)

It depends how much spam or other abuse occurred from it.

I don't get the point, if someone is selling a domain the only content on the site will be advertising that. And you can bet people will forget to delete or not update the record as needed, making it kind of useless.

This is what really sucks about domain names

Have you tried getting a good, unused name today? Anything remotely close to a dictionary word, if unused, is squatted with a $xx,000 price tag. Do registrars get a cut of these sales prices because it seems ridiculous to allow squatting.

I'm not a fan of domains becoming the new kind of real estate.

Welcome to 2003.

It's indeed written by Claude, like most of the website: https://github.com/jdevalk/specification.website/commit/99b1...

From now on it's the publishers who have to solve a captcha.

Define "squatted domain"