Namecheap just seized and disabled all my domains

Posted by sashk 6 hours ago

Namecheap just seized and disabled all my domains(www.reddit.com)

337 points | 162 commentspage 3

Benard-dev 4 hours ago|

Does this mean we should not always entrust our domains with only one registrar?

Aardwolf 4 hours ago||

What do you mean, can you entrust one domain with multiple registrars?

Benard-dev 4 hours ago||

I meant for people with multiple domains.

TZubiri 2 hours ago||

Splitting them round robin, or even in half, sounds horrible.

But maybe if you have 1 (one) backup domain like mydomain.net then you can host that on another vendor. But I'd rather just fail and focus on restoring at that point, you are still losing all traffic to the main domain, and contacting users with a secondary domain they've never heard off is a security posture nightmare and unprofessional.

m3047 3 hours ago||

They requested presentation of a phone number and ID, so this sounds like info harvesting (for laundering / resale).

charcircuit 2 hours ago||

It shouldn't even be possible to seize a domain in the first place. Too often it ends up hurting legitimate actors.

convolvatron 5 hours ago||

this is going to be an unpopular opinion, but this was the inevitable result of changing a function with trivial cost and broad social utility (name registration) from a public service to a commercial one. at the time we heard a lot of standard arguments about the innovation and competition that only a market based solution could bring. its really not a surprise that this is the kind of innovation that resulted.

londons_explore 5 hours ago||

Yes - domain registries should be run by the government.

DNS etc can be run by third parties

proxyscore 4 hours ago|||

Nominet does yet they outsource.

Besides, which government do you want to run .com domains

Muromec 4 hours ago||

UN of course

lstodd 3 hours ago||

this is not even funny.

sieabahlpark 3 hours ago|||

[dead]

ranger_danger 4 hours ago||

How would that help? The government could still block domains registered by people in adversarial countries.

Personally I would not want the US government controlling and micro-managing who gets to have a .com domain.

convolvatron 55 minutes ago||

I certainly wasn't nominating the US government. something more like international NGO. the us can do whatever it wants with the .us root, just like all the other ISO country code roots.

nulbyte 40 minutes ago||

So, ICANN?

convolvatron 21 minutes ago||

the internet corporations for names and numbers was established specifically to coordinate the for profit registrar model. but sure, an organization like that with a charter to simply manage the namespace directly.

farlight 5 hours ago|

If you still did business with them after this, it's your own fault and you deserve everything they're doing to you:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30504812

(Before reacting to the headline, please read at least some of the discussion.)

Sparkle-san 4 hours ago||

I read this particular comment[0] and I can't say that I understand the connection you're suggesting. If I ran a company and a country was directly attacking the city were ~1k of my employees live[1], I wouldn't want to continue to do business with them either.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30507103

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namecheap#Termination_of_servi...

janalsncm 4 hours ago|||

No, I don’t see how one follows from the other. Most of us are not Russian and don’t have websites NC would consider relevant to the war.

On the other hand, most of us probably can imagine not checking our email for three days, getting caught up in some automated purgatory, and experiencing customer neglect. We can imagine this because it is the default customer experience these days.

lstodd 3 hours ago||

Well you know I don't see how 'registered in Russia' has anything to do with the war. In 2022 alone about 1.5m people emigrated, and are still 'registered in Russia'.

This was a poorly thought-out virtue-signalling knee-jerk back then and of course everyone in their right mind transferred their domains out because this is not how you do business.

Joker_vD 1 hour ago||

Next thing, you're going to argue that when the US sanctioned the whole population of Crimea back in 2014, that also was "a poorly thought-out virtue-signalling knee-jerk" reaction that worsened, for no good reason, the situation of the helpless Ukrainians who had happened to live there and now also had to live under Russia's brutal rule and face the international isolation. But you'd be wrong.

machomaster 17 minutes ago||

Explain why this theoretical argument would be wrong.

tbrownaw 4 hours ago|||

Are you trying to suggest that the issue in the current post has the same underlying cause (not doing business with countries on the other side of a war)?

machomaster 14 minutes ago||

I assume that the underlying reason is "badly organized, badly managed, making stupid decisions overall". Certainly sounds like something you should not trust as your business partner.

RoisinSapphire 34 minutes ago|||

yep, this was the thing that stopped me from using them

ManuelKiessling 4 hours ago||

Mh, if anything, this would make me want to do business with them more.

Now what?