[5ESS]

That’s terrifying. By far the worst part of this. If they ban somebody for TOS violations that is fair, but preventing people from transferring out their domain and setting it to pendingdelete is really insidious. What they are doing is akin to stealing anyone domain name permanently with no recourse. This may be grounds for a lawsuit.

[withinboredom]

It's abuse and theft, plain and simple. Replace "domain" with literally any physical object. You can't just take someone else's shit, no matter how high-and-mighty you think you are (excepting governments, of course).

[withinboredom]

Oh, if anyone wants to argue that it’s “in the TOS” that sounds like a contract no normal person would sign and likely not enforceable (IANAL) if pushed. No “sane” person would say, “yeah, if you think I’m doing something wrong, just sell all my shit!”

[5ESS]

It’s sickening. They are committing a massive crime here and getting away with it. It’s time somebody alerts the media and blow the whistle on Cloudflares abusive actions.

I wonder how many customers domains Cloudflare stole/deleted who’s owner didn’t have the luxury of knowing the Hacker News publicity trick?

[withinboredom]

Indeed, this might likely fall into criminal behavior and not civil (though they’d be liable for civil damages as well). Someone should let a few jurisdictions that have cloud flare customers and theft is illegal know about this.

[travoltaj]

I would've 100% sued and paid for PR releases if they deleted a domain name I owned.

I'm sure I could make decent money off punitive damages based off the email they sent, and these headlines would be pretty catchy -

"Tech giant siezed and deleted a customers domain name."

"Using Cloudflare can destroy your business overnight. This is how"

"Own a domain name? Your registrar can delete it without any recourse."

"Cloudflare siezed and deleted a customers' domain"

I'd need to check if I can use the word "illegally" in the title.

I hope they compensate OP. I'm sure they could still sue them if inclined..ICANN should have some rules about this.

[5ESS]

I implore you to consider alerting media outlets about Cloudflares abusive actions anyway. More needs to be down to expose CloudFlare’s abusive actions. They can’t keep getting away with this.

[travoltaj]

I don't wanna spend money or effort on it since I wasn't involved.