Lawsuit alleges domain was renewed and should not have been auctioned off.
A high-profile expired domain auction for blockchain.ai ended today, but the former registrant has filed a lawsuit claiming he renewed the domain.
In the lawsuit, Howard Gould stated that he was the domain’s registrant as of December 2017.
The domain was set to auto-renew with OnlyDomains, but the auto-renewal failed, resulting in the domain expiring on July 19, 2025.
After becoming aware of the failure on September 21, Gould claims he paid OnlyDomains for the renewal and received a confirmation.
On October 3, he emailed OnlyDomain asking why his invoice was still labeled as pending. He also noticed the domain was listed for sale in a Namecheap auction.
The .ai domain registry, managed by Identity Digital, has a partnership with Namecheap to sell expired domains through its auction platform. When the domain was on the verge of deletion, an auction was initiated at Namecheap.
On October 6, OnlyDomains informed Gould that he would also have to pay a restoration fee for the domain. After paying the invoices, he alleges that the domain still went into PendingDelete status.
Gould, through an attorney, contacted Identity Digital on October 8 to try to halt the auction.
That didn’t happen, so Gould filed a lawsuit (pdf) yesterday in California. The suit names OnlyDomains, its parent company CentralNic NZ Ltd (part of Team Internet Group), Identity Digital, and Namecheap.
Source: https://domainnamewire.com/
