But what happens when your domain name slips out of your grip? It turns out, this can happen all too easily, as an Alaskan non-profit organization found out recently. The non-profit paid GoDaddy.com, a popular, low-cost domain registrar, in November of 2003, to renew their domain name. GoDaddy.com accepted the credit card transaction. But somehow the domain name found its way into an electronic limbo where someone else found it, was able to purchase and register it, and set up a particularly pernicious pornographic site, using the non-profit organization’s domain name. The pornography site can benefit from the site’s rank with the search engine, Google, which had ranked the page, “5 out of 10”.

To quote from someone specializing in domain name services, “Every day, thousands of expired domain names are deleted and become available for re-registration. The valuable ones, and there are many ways to establish "value" in a name, are re-registered within the very first second of becoming re-available. That is the basis for the fastest moving, most interesting, and most profitable sector of the domain name industry.”

In other words, if your domain name has become “visible” and is linked to many sites, it is considered a valuable commodity. Any lapses in the registration of your domain name, for whatever reason, can be the cause of you losing your domain name to an aggressive reseller or the reseller’s client.

What went wrong with GoDaddy.com? Representatives of GoDaddy.com claim that they have no control over the domain name in question, or the situation that occurred. This is partly true. GoDaddy.com is able to keep its costs down by interacting with customers almost exclusively through a software interface. The customer orders domain names online, GoDaddy.com’s software sends an email confirming the transaction, which the customer is required to answer in the next 24 hours. If, through some software glitch, no email gets sent or received (there is some evidence of this occurring with this registrar in more than one case), then no registration actually takes place.

Other domain registrars, some of whom charge more money for domain registration, will contact the client if there is a problem with the domain name registration transaction. But there is still the need for vigilance. Whenever a person purchases a domain name, he or she should immediately check the status of the domain name registration by going to the website http://www.internic.org/whois.html, and search for the domain name being registered. It may take a few minutes, or even a few hours for the name of the domain owner to show up, but it should show. Whether it does or not, the client needs to contact the organization with whom the domain name is being registered, either by email or telephone, and confirm the transaction.

The latest update on this story is that GoDaddy's client, after trying to reach the company by phone several times unsuccessfully, and being placed on hold for long periods of time or disconnected altogether, was able to speak personally to a customer service representative. The customer service representative suggested that the new owner of the domain name in question, possibly hacked the Yahoo email account listed on the registration of the domain name, in order to take over the domain name. This is a possible, if somewhat implausible explanation of what took place. In the words of one of the members of the non profit organization, concerning the situation: "What a mess!"
 
http://reports.internic.net/cgi/registrars/problem-report.cgi