What can I do?

Company domain name taken by someone else

[jgar]

My first holiday in years, and while I was away for 1 week, I found out one of our most popular websites had lost its domain name. Why? Because our ISP had tried to switch the domain-name billing to themselves, under my approval, but transferred the billing of an old domain name instead. So our popular domain name expired without my knowing. Within 1 day, a person in China registered our popular name. Since then, the website is unaccessible. What's worse, all our products have this domain name printed on them. Since this fiasco a few days ago, online sales have.. er ... vanished!

The domain name is the name of our company, and very specific. We have been trading under this name for 12 years, and have had the domain name for about 5 years.

What can we do?
Changing our domain name will require a large investment
Can we appeal to the registering authorities?

I have learnt 2 important lessons in this case: 1) I am responsible for the security on my own domain names 2) Taking holidays every now and again is important.

Thanks for any advice!

[brotherhood of LAN]

I was looking for some older threads...I'm sure there have been at least one or two along similar lines

Although not directly related, this is a good read!

[webmasterworld.com...]

I mention this one as it goes along the lines of "acquiring" what is not owned by you.

Unless the person in China uses the domain to market something on the site, I doubt you can do much about it - though someone else may know better. Otherwise you could angle towards him using a copyrighted name and that he should surrender the domain name back to you :)

[amhitvl]

send that guy e. mail
I think he would like to sell that domain name
most people pay about $100.00