back to article Domain hijackers forced to return numeric names

Two Dutch companies must return thousands of numeric domain names they got on a first-come-first-served basis from SIDN, the Dutch .nl registry. Numeric domain names are names made up entirely of numbers (eg 1234.nl), or numbers separated by hyphens (eg 12-34.nl). SIDN expected a landrush when it made these domains available …

COMMENTS

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  1. philip
    Flame

    Haha

    Domain hijackers should burn in hell!

  2. triky

    egads !

    i bet 69.nl was the first to go and now it's worth gazillions !

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    They did nothing wrong.. yeah right...

    What SIDN did wrong in the first place, is that they said: "They [the 2 ass sucking companies] did nothing wrong. Letting 35 mailservers hammer (read DDOS-sing) the registration process is not prohibited by the rules"

    If they acted right the first time and took all the domains back and called them twats, they'd be cool :)

  4. David Gosnell

    Re: 69.nl

    who.is reports:

    "69.nl is excluded"

    (ditto for others with two digits)

    I guess like most TLDs, they forbid two-character (was going to say two-letter) domains except for proven pre-existing cases like BT, MS (Morgan Stanley, not the other one) etc.

    Bah, I remember the days when no digits were allowed at all, ever....

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Flame

    Shame on them

    for trying to engage in capitalist endeavor buying something limited and selling it for more later. Thats HIJACKING!11!! I hope the real estate industry doesn't get word of this the world economy will implode.

  6. Danny
    Jobs Horns

    .EU

    The whole .EU thing was a huge scam as well, a few companies got there grubby hands on most of the most popular domains.

    Very unfair.

    Very, very, very, very!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Stop

    what rock have SIDN been hiding under?

    The people in charge at SIDN should resign immediately as they clearly have no idea about anything that's happened in the domain industry in the last five years and are therefore not competent to hold their posts.

    The fact that they did not anticipate this activity, especially after the .eu launch, simply beggars belief.

    This, from the organisation that blocks whois lookups for 24 hours after a mere handful of queries per IP address!

    And anyway, who really cares if two companies own thousands of numeric .nl domain names?

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Boffin

    RIP DNS

    Its been my opinion for some time that the DNS system as we know it is doomed.

    It was originally designed to describe a hierachical network of machines or networks of networks of machines, iyswim.

    As the years have gone by and the internet has developed and gradually been subverted by 'e-commerce' into an enormous tacky electronic shopping mall, DNS has similarly been subverted from its original hierarchical design to being a flat keyword database.

    For example, I've noticed over recent years a lot of advertising for new movies which quote website names like www.somestupidfilmnamemovie.com ...

    ... personally I think sites like this should be www.acmestudios.com/somestupidfilemname.

  9. Curtis McFarland

    digits are allowed

    "I remember the days when no digits were allowed at all"

    FYI - I registered my 5-digit Zip Code (*****.com) with Network Solutions in 2000 with no problems.

    Have things changed? 'Don't mean to start a flame.

  10. MG

    .EU too

    yes the .eu rush was a complete sham. we applied for 3 of our established trading names in the sunrise period and spent a ton of time preparing the supporting documentation only to have it rejected with no explanations and no workable appeal (the appeal process that existed was deliberately contrived to make this next to impossible).

    As there were no other interested parties before the landrush we were confident we would secure the domains.

    However, it turns out that the .eu registry saw fit to publish a handy list of all the applications that were rejected (and therefore all the names with interested buyers) and low & behold at 0.2 seconds after midnight on landrush day all our names were scooped by some unaccountable faceless gangsters in the netherlands.

    This level of abject stupidity on the part of a governing body cannot be attributed to sheer incompetance surely. Greasy palms all round (how about that BSI eh?)

    In an ironic twist I just swallowed my pride & bought one of the names I originally applied for off the back of the URL lorry and it cost me significantly less that the original application to the .eu registry did (taking ISP fees & supporting doc preparation / associated fees into account).

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