[duskwuff]

I don't know about Network Solutions, but allowing anyone to renew a domain is not the norm. In some situations, it can even pose legal problems. For instance, a somewhat common resolution to domain trademark disputes is for the owner to pledge to discontinue use of a domain and to allow the domain to expire without renewing or transferring it. If anyone is allowed to renew a domain without needing the owner's permission, they can potentially put the owner of a trademark-infringing domain in a sticky situation.

[mmahemoff]

Surely the resolution to any trademark conflict would be a domain transfer or not. "Let it lapse and end up with some other random owner" benefits only the lawyers.

That said, I can see why some owners may wish to immediately disavow a domain if they consider it to be a legal or reputational risk. In that case, it can simply be transferred to another owner, so I don't see why it would be a problem for anyone to renew it (though payment fraud might be a separate concern from some registrars).

[duskwuff]

Transferring a domain costs money (although not much); more importantly, it causes the domain to be renewed for an extra year. If the owner of the trademark doesn't want the domain to exist (e.g, if it's some off-brand use of their mark), having the domain transferred to them is counterproductive.

[apocalyptic0n3]

Just trying to understand this. Wouldn't that actually be good? Wouldn't the trademark owner want the domain so they could keep it unassigned? If they let it expire, someone could eventually purchase it and use it for similar purposes. That seems counterproductive to me, not transferring it.

[duskwuff]

> Wouldn't the trademark owner want the domain so they could keep it unassigned?

Consider a low-quality domain name like "buy-acme-widgets-cheap-123.com" (for the trademark "Acme"). There are so many possible domain names of that form that Acme Co. would have no real interest in trying to protect that specific one from being misused in the future.

Another messy situation would be if the domain name contained multiple trademarks belonging to different owners. The holder of one trademark would probably be reluctant to take ownership of a domain name which also infringed on another company's trademark!

[dwild]

Then they won't care if the settlement is to not use it. It will just point to nowhere...

[0x0]

If they lawyered up enough to get one party to agree to let it lapse, I'd say the outlook is not favorable for any copycats.

[toast0]

some TLDs (mostly ccTLDs) have onerous ownership requirements, it might be easier in that case to just have ann agreement to let it be dormant, given whatever circumstances.

[freehunter]

I don't know why anyone would ever use Network Solutions. They have a long history of really shady practices and breaches. I worked info sec for a company that registered their domains through Network Solutions, and someone called in, got a password reset, and took administrative control over the account. Re-routed our domain for several hours, including MX records. Doing that investigation, I found tons of articles online of others saying that same thing, that Network Solutions let their accounts be taken over by someone with no claim to the account.

[toast0]

Given that it's at Network Solutions, I'm surprised they haven't been able to finagle a renewal. Based on the age of the domain, they probably simply never moved the domain to another registrar once the opportunity was available.