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by kgwxd 2640 days ago
I'm pretty sure there are many real world examples of domain names being taken.
2 comments

Domains are a whole different ball game thought, I've seen instances of domain names being seized for legal reasons (ie FBI seizing domains of torrent sites), but if the UK govt wanted to seize say sussexroyal.com (which btw is available on GoDaddy right now or a cool $70), that would be a much bigger ordeal of going through ICANN vs just "asking" Instagram

He mentioned that he was able to keep his twitter handle and that's most likely because Twitter doesn't pull this sort of shit. I remember a few years back Israel wanted to the twitter handle "@israel" for their official twitter account, asked twitter and they would not hand it over from the original user. I think they ended up paying the original user something like $500k for the handle, which IMO was a damn good deal for the user.

> I think they ended up paying the original user something like $500k for the handle, which IMO was a damn good deal for the user.

I've always wondered such deals could just be bait for a user to violate the Twitter terms of service, and therefore free the username up for others to use.

One of the more famous examples was Mike Rowe's domain. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_v._MikeRoweSoft
I remember that, forgot about it, and now that you reminded me, hoped it turned out to be Mike Rowe from Dirty Jobs. Alas, it is not.
Hilarious! They gave him an xbox and some cash.