OurDomain

Domain names, explained for the people who share one

Section

When a domain lapses or is taken

Names lapse and names get taken. This section covers what can still be done at each stage, and what is genuinely out of reach.

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Two situations bring an organisation here. In the first, a name it held for years has stopped working, and the reason is that nobody renewed it. In the second, a name it wants, often the obvious one built from its own title, is registered to somebody it has never heard of. The two feel very different from the inside. In both cases the useful first move is the same: find out exactly what state the record is in, because the state determines which options remain and how much time is left.

An expired name does not vanish on the day it expires. It passes through a sequence of stages, each with its own rules about who may act. During the earliest stage the previous holder can usually renew as if nothing happened. Later, recovery is still possible but involves a redemption process and a heavier fee. Later still the name is released and anybody may register it, at which point a lapsed club address becomes a competitive item rather than an administrative one. Knowing which stage a name is in, and how long that stage lasts, is worth more than any amount of urgency.

Names held by other people follow a different logic. Most were registered legitimately, and being obvious is not a claim. A choir that has performed under a name since 1974 has more standing than a group formed last month, but standing is not the same as a right, and the dispute procedures that exist are narrow: they address registrations made in bad faith against an existing trademark, not ordinary competition for a good word. That distinction is set out in the pages on disputes and trademarks, and it saves a great deal of wasted effort.

What remains, in most real cases, is a purchase. Approaching a holder is a skill of its own: what to say, what not to reveal, and why an approach through an intermediary is so common. The pages here describe how such a purchase is actually structured and where names are listed for sale. Before any of that, it is worth reading renewals and expiry, because the cheapest recovery is the one that never becomes necessary.

In this section

  1. What happens after a domain expiresAn expired domain does not vanish on the expiry date. It moves through a sequence of stages, and the options narrow at each one until they run out entirely.
  2. Recovering a lapsed domain nameA lapsed name is usually recoverable, and the work is mostly administrative rather than technical. The order of the steps matters more than the speed of any one of them.
  3. When the wanted name is already takenFinding the perfect name registered to somebody else is the ordinary condition of the domain system, not bad luck. What matters next is establishing what kind of holder is on the other end.
  4. Approaching the owner of a domainA first enquiry about a registered name decides how the rest of the conversation goes. Most of them fail because they say too much rather than too little.
  5. Buying a domain somebody else holdsBuying a registered name is a private transaction with no central register of sales and no fixed price. The mechanics are simple once the two sides have agreed.
  6. Trademarks and domain namesA domain register and a trademark register are two separate systems that never consult each other. A name can be perfectly available in one and already spoken for in the other.
  7. The UDRP dispute procedure explainedThe UDRP is a narrow administrative procedure for clear cases of abusive registration. It is not a general remedy for wanting a name that somebody else already has.