Sony Forgets To Pay For Domain, Hilarity Ensues 277
First time accepted submitter Dragoness Eclectic writes Early Tuesday, gamers woke up to find out that they couldn't log in to any Sony Online Entertainment games--no Everquest, no Planetside 2, none of them. Oddly, the forums where company reps might have posted some explanation weren't reachable, either. A bit of journalistic investigation by EQ2Wire came across the explanation: SOE forgot to renew the domain registration on SonyOnline.net, the hidden domain that holds all their nameservers. After 7 weeks of non-payment post-expiration, NetworkSolutions reclaimed the domain, sending all access to Sony's games into an internet black hole. Sony has since paid up. SOE's president, John Smedley, has admitted that the expiration notices were being sent to an "unread email" address.
Black hole? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Black hole? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Black hole? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm afraid that the current "whois" practices were deliberately set up to allow plausibility deniability, to protect the domain owners from being actually reached by the spammers and numerous sales people or lawyers with cause to contact domain owners. The domain vendors benefit from this: they can follow the letter of the law, but not actually support contacting the domain owners to handle criminal or abuse behavior, and wait for days, weeks, or years while lawyers collect the evidence and chain of repeated contact failures before a court order can be obtained.
In the meantime, they're collecting the registration fees, in bulk, for the relevant domain and all the related domain names. The current system is a critical revenue stream, which the domain and SSL key vendors have no need or desire to encumber by enforcing legitimate contact information.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)