The Candidate Who Died but Whose Good Name Lives On!

What Happens when a Candidate Dies Before His Domain Does?

One reason we started this business was the following story. The names are omitted:

A Congressional seat comes open and a rather interesting man with a yen for new experiences and adventure decides to run for it. Disgusted with the two-party system he chooses to run on a third party ticket. The third party is happy to have someone of his caliber on their ticket even if he is a novice candidate.

He chooses two domain names that he thinks are appropriate: his name followed by a Dot ORG and a Dot INFO. He buys one of the names for two years and a friend of his pays for one year of the other domain for him. He puts up a simple website but is overcome by the pace of the campaign and never quite gets it to where he hoped it would be.

He loses the race but since it wasn't unexpected he is not truly disappointed. Most candidates lose and they spend a lot more money in the effort. He is better for having made the effort. Life goes on...

Until it doesn't. Barely three months after the campaign ends, he is killed in a freak sky-diving accident. (We did say that he had a taste for adventure didn't we?) His friends mourn his loss. Curiously he receives more media coverage from this event than he did as a Congressional candidate.

The following month, someone else with the same name is researching domain names and comes across the dead candidate's domains. After two years the name that was purchased by the candidate expires and becomes available again. However, the name reserved by his friend does not become available although it was set to expire after only one year.

Why does it not become available? Maybe the friend continues to renew it as a tribute to the dead candidate but since he never puts a live web page up it probably isn't that. More likely is that when he bought it he didn't notice that his domain company had an Automatic Renewal button selected and has been charging him $12 each year to renew a dead web domain for his dead friend.

Unfortunately for anyone else wanting to use this domain name, it will probably go on being renewed automatically until the friend notices the charge on his credit card statement one year or (more likely) the credit card expires.

And that sad tale is one reason why we entered this business of leasing domain names to candidates.