Something I've wondered... if you publicly say that a domain is for sale and someone has a trademark for it would you automatically lose in arbitration?
Around 1998 I registered a domain. Sony registered a trademark with the same name a few years after that. Someone on a Gmail account asked if he could buy it - I later found out he worked for Sony. I told him no - it's for a game I've been working on. I went on a vacation for a month and when I got back there was a fedex package filled with documents from Sony saying I'm violating their trademark and they'll take the domain.
I got a lawyer and he told me that I shouldn't offer it for sale as that would show the arbitration board that I don't need the domain. But he also told me that in order to fight the trademark it would probably cost a couple of hundred thousand dollars. So I could keep the domain but not use it for commerce...
In the end I ended up selling it to Sony but through my lawyer - I never stated it was for sale. But this was early on for domains and I wonder what the process is like now.
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...
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.
Easier said than done, you don’t get lawyers fees back for winning a frivolous lawsuit, but you are required to pay them if you want to win. It’s entirely feasible for a company to force your hand in this way.
> Especially, if your domain is older than the trademark.
My understanding is that trademarks are about the term being recognised "in common", while a ® is once you pay money to your govt's department for the fancy paper. Hence, if you registered <cool name>.com and sold said cool named game, you already have a trademark simply because you're the author. (Of course, money for lawyers and proving things in court isn't free, but you have legal grounds to stand on nonetheless.)
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.
This is a required TMCH assertion for certain TLDs.
This has been my understanding. I was told by lawyer in in th 90's that it would be described as squatting in court.
Be a big company.
Look for interesting sounding domain names that are owned but not being used by individuals.
Create a product with the same name.
Sue the person with the domain name and take it from them.
Win, because you're big.
Are you allowed to share how much (roughly) you sold it for?
Not too much... $30K plus all legal fees I had paid.
>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...
What was the domain?
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.
I agree with you about assets being for sale (if someone wrote a big enough check I'd sell my house right now) and commercial not trumping non commercial, but there was, at least for a while, a reasonable argument for opposing "domain squatting" under the theory that domain names were a limited resource and society as a whole benefits from those resources being used more optimally.
It's like concert tickets or any other limited resource that is transferable, "society" generally wants most people to have access to them but if they're too cheap then it's easy for one rich person to just buy them all.
Anyways, domain names are perhaps less limited these days (and google/claude kind of remove user's direct interaction anyways) if the usage of non-dotcoms are anything to go by. Also it's super hard to distinguish personal private use vs squatting.
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.
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 noticed the UDRP rules had changed last year, the main change is of course related to WHOIS respecting privacy now. Looking that up:
"The registrar must provide the full Registration Data to the UDRP provider within two business days after the registrar is notified that a UDRP complaint exists. The registrar must also lock the domain."
I'm nitpicking: it's disclosure not disclaimer.
> 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.
This website has been trying to gain a veneer of legitimacy for months now. Half of its contents aren't even published by any real standards body, it's just AI-centric "best practices" for the current generation of hyperscaler models.
They need Georgism for DNS names. You set your own price for your domain. But you have to pay 2-5% of that price annually to keep it.
That way, squatters are incentived to sell it to someone who's going to use it.
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.
The problem with that is the squatters would just turn it into a low quality blog or something along those lines.
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.
> Remove it when the domain is no longer for sale. The convention has no “not for sale” value; absence is the only way to say no.
Since most domains that are for sale don't currently have such a record, it would be wrong to assume they are not for sale. Therefore, absence of such a record does not explicitly mean "not for sale." It's no different from a house: a "for sale" sign in the front yard means it's for sale, but lack of a sign doesn't mean it's not for sale; it could mean the owner doesn't wish to advertise that way, or at all.
..so? It’s better than what we have now
It’s interesting that domains apparently are still such a big business, despite how browsers have been deemphasizing URLs and domain names, and given the prevalence of apps.
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.
> I have a domain name with the TLD of "today".
I don't like the pollution of the global namespace. If someone thinks, there should be a domain named today, fine, but don't put it in the global namespace by creating a new TLD. DNS is a hierarchical structure, there is no reason domains should all be only 4 segments long. Arguable 'com.' should have really been 'com.us.', but that's history.
i also have a solution
1. People who can't understand how tld works, learn it. Changing the world to accomodate ignorance is not my preferred direction.
2. We don't link the concept of domain names to economically viable for an US citizen, since that is not a fair for probably a few billion other people.
I think this solves none of the current problems with domain names, but at least it does not add any new ones.
Habituation is difficult to overcome. If domain names had been freeform from the start, we wouldn’t have this particular issue.
Domain names are still a finite space, given that a full domain name can be at most 253 characters, and each domain label at most 63 characters. “Requiring” a .com/.org/.net/.CC at the end isn’t really that much of a restriction.
By the way, madamelic.com appears to be available.
The concept that the only purpose for anything, whether it's a domain, a pair of shoes, a plot of land filled with trees, is economic growth or investment is a perverse sickness.
>I have a domain name with the TLD of "today". Many people think my email is [email]@[domain].today.com
Skill Issue
Imagine if AOL keywords had stuck around.
Yeah cause we really had to improve domain squatters lives.
In my opinion domain squatting should be banned instead.
Like a lot of things, society would probably benefit if we had caps on how much a single entity could own.
Or maybe just a heavy tax on arbitrage.
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.
Do you have any domains that you purchased with the intention to use and haven't been able to use them yet?
news.ycombinator.today
And what is the definition of a domain squatter?
With real-property squatting is using what someone else owns (land) w/o permission. Domains are only rented. If you rent land but don't use it the way someone else would it's not squatting. So, renting a domain that someone else wants and not using it in the way they think it should be used isn't squatting, correct?
I agree it's a problem when I want a domain and it looks unused to me. I don't think it's really squatting.
I think it's also a jerk move to control resources just to extract w/o developing those resources. But that also happens with real-property.
All that to say: "squatting" on a domain is a "hard problem".
_for-sale baby-shoes never-used> If you are willing to sell, the interested buyer has no way to learn that short of a cold email to a WHOIS contact that privacy redaction has probably removed.
Has everybody forgotten about well-known email alias addresses? Inquiries about the hostname itself would be (among other things) exactly what `hostmaster@domain` was intended as a point-of-contact for. No need for a working WHOIS service, let alone a non-privacy-redacted WHOIS record.
I've recently bought many domains (1000+ over the last year). A few of them (the more valuable ones) all had TXT records for `@` (the root) that had for-sale info. This new record is just a TXT record anyway, proving the point that the interested buyer can quite easily learn of a domain for sale with existing mechanisms.
Also, for domains that are just "parked", not in current use, obviously the parking page can just have a for-sale banner. This is exceedingly common.
> Enquiries that would have been welcome never arrive, and the ones that do arrive are indistinguishable from spam.
Laughable misrepresentation.
I noticed few commenters mention something like a rule: If you say your domain is for sale, they will take it from you because..... And was wondering, few years back, twitter was sold to mr Elon. I will just say it like this: Did they lose all their trademarks and rights to all domains, if someone register twitter.cc or twitter.it or similar, because twitter is for sale and they did not need the trademark for business anymore?
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.
I had registered trademark, and when you register one they ask you what are you doing. I was selling clothes, shoes, fashion stuff. I wanted to get the domain with that name, and it was already taken by someone who sells industrial manufacturing machines. Heavy equipment. They also had registered trademark with the exact same name. The idea is that you as a customer won't be confused who is selling something when you enter a shop and see that name.
I now get what you're saying, but then this can be turned against everyday people. Imagine you have a domain that is your personal blog, vacation photos, stuff like that. No ads, nothing to sell there. Then you receive a message "We from Microsoft/Sony/IBM/Amazon are willing to give you 10Mil for this domain, because we have plans for it, if you won't use it for something bigger ofc" And then show your reply in court saying "He want to sell it". Even if you run a successful business, they can troll you and say "We offer 1bil - you and your family will not have to work for the rest of your life", and then say "His business is fake, he is selling the domain". I don't know if this is possible but if it is, then the whole system is wrong I guess.
This would have been great for a 2-letter .st domain I had been wanting for years (which appeared to be parked and just redirecting towards ticketmaster or something, with no contact info available). I was bummed about it for a long time, as the .st nic had a sale on 2-letter domains which made me want to pull the trigger, but it got scooped up a day or two prior apparently. I lucked out this year and saw they let it lapse! (I did have a yearly calendar reminder telling me to run whois :)
This was first done by SIDN I believe, the company that orchestrates the .nl domains. They however, do not implement most of the spec.
When searching their online whois[1], they'll tell you if a domain is for sale and link to the for sale page. They don't use any of the info you put in the DNS though. The URL comes from their internal system. You need to register it separately. They also don't use the price, txt or anything else you put in the DNS.
All they use is the "fcod", to look up the url in their own system. They had a different syntax for this before, but this functionality has existed for some years.
I am bit puzzled, read through the RFC itself (https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc10023/) but could not find who is going to use it and why?
(Not quoting the article directly due to HN's auto AI filters)
In "Common mistakes" this article first says not to add this record if you're not actually planning to sell the domain, then says that the record doesn't oblige anyone to do anything, that feels quite weird to me.
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.
Sounds good to me.
I have a particularly valuable domain name that would be perfect for a museum that later opened with the same name.
I'd love to sell or even give it to the museum, but all my offers have been ignored. I don't blame them, since everything on the Internet is a scam these days.
But I won't just put it for sale to the highest bidder. Then it'll end up with a squatter. I'd rather sit on it.
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?
> why is everyone such a p**** about
We can do a lot better than using non-inclusive language like this. There are better ways to express the underlying concept.
Can't wait for some kid to slip this into Google.com via AI chatbot and then massage the chatbot to complete the sale for $1.
From the RFC The "_for-sale" leaf node name can be placed at any level of the DNS, except in the .arpa infrastructure TLD.
There used to be a number of sites that would let users create {username}.some.subdomain.apex.tld. Perhaps this is not a thing any more I honestly don't know. If it is still a thing and someone registers the username "_for-sale" they could cause some confusion.
Why allow any level of DNS? If you are selling a domain that should include the entire domain and thus the _for-sale should only be valid at the apex unless the goal is to cause legal problems for some big providers.
Initial underscore is a reserved namespace for this reason.
Is that universally true on all sites that allow a user to create a sub-domain?
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)
“This domain is somewhat worn.” -UO joke
This is probably the only item that can sold without saying, "Used, Like New"
It depends how much spam or other abuse occurred from it.
Just think how sullied whitehouse.com has become due to the current occupier of whitehouse.gov.
But what about the costs? There are several domains I want. They're just sitting there and no one is doing anything with them. But when I ask to buy them, they ask for outrageous prices (at least in my opinion.) If someone else bought the domain, I would think, "I'm just being outbid." But they never change hands. I've tried telling the owners that I'm their only hope. They just sit there because they have some insane idea for how much it is worth.
Wonderful. Another tool for domain campers. Just what standards bodies should be spending time on…
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.
A parked domain would potentially make more money hosting AI generated “content” to improve its SEO and passive ad revenue. That’s why invested interests have pushed for this side-channel “For sale” sign.
This is what really sucks about domain names
Sigh, I'm not a fan of domains becoming the new kind of real estate.
Wonder how hard will it be in 20 years to get a good, unused name in a reasonable price.
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.
Many registrars operate as brokers for domain sales indeed (i.e. godaddy, namecheap). Then you have tlds operators with their "premium" domains that go for 1000x the regular price. Premium usually being defined as the top 10k english words and every kind of l33t spelling of sexual words.
Neither registrars nor tld operators care about squatting, even when they don't get a cut. Why would they? The squatter is paying them the same as you'd pay them.
Registrars get a lot more domains registered at 5-20 $/year this way. How would our lives improve if squatting were "not allowed"?
Well, at least there's still some room for that with some of the new TLDs.
But at some point we will also exhaust all nice TLDs too...
It will be even more difficult than it is now
I'm not a fan of domains becoming the new kind of real estate.
Welcome to 2003.
hah, fair point..
this is how we get under-the-radar marketplaces for llms
Making things easier, and more profitable, for domain squatters is exactly the wrong direction to be going in! I hate how the internet has turned to squeezing every last penny out of its users. This is pathetic and raw.
Is that good or bad? That's a genuine question here.
How long until these links are swimming with malware?
Nobody asked for this
my slop detection instinct is so good that I can tell it's slop before even clicking the link. I precogged the neon colors of the website, the pill modals, the 'it's not X, it's Y', the emdashes...
It's indeed written by Claude, like most of the website: https://github.com/jdevalk/specification.website/commit/99b1...
I feel that this period before the AI bust is mostly a veeeery long window for people to commit reputational suicide.
The game is to see who survives the longest without submitting to committing blunders that reveal an intrinsic incorrectible untrustworthy personality and low quality of work standards. And each month that goes by, more people around us are joining the game, some people fall through social pressure, and some feel more comfortable to display their antisocial/low quality traits as those around us do.
I personally feel comfortable holding on my anti AI purity comfortably even if 95% of people around me do it, I always suspected it anyways, let them keep on outing themsleves.
From now on it's the publishers who have to solve a captcha.
They should keep this up for a year and then seize all of these squatted domains and auction them off.
Define "squatted domain"
Between this and domain-owner secrecy the whole domain name system has become financialized over the last 30 years. We are not in any way better off.