get stuck in
@Edwin and don't forget to drop the name of the UK's best domain forum!
I hardly think so (about me, I mean, not about this forum). Believe it or not, I'm not one for the limelight, as anyone who's seen me in the darker corners of one of the get-togethers already knows.
Whoever you do talk to, I just hope you get the story RIGHT.
This is
not a "get-rich-quick" industry. It's also
not cybersquatting i.e. it's not about taking domains "hostage" that companies should be "entitled" to.
For those registering and trading in generic domains, it's anywhere from a hobby to a full-time business, but it's a completely legitimate one. As Nominet themselves say in their "Experts Overview" DRS guidance
https://nominet-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Expert_Overview.pdf
"Trading in domain names is of itself unobjectionable." (3.2, p.9)
"4.10 Can use of a purely generic or descriptive term be abusive?
Yes but, depending on the facts, the threshold level of evidence needed to establish that this is the case is likely to be much higher. It may well often depend upon the extent to which such a term has acquired a secondary meaning, which increases the likelihood that any registration was made with knowledge of the rights that existed in the term in question. In many such cases where there is little or no evidence of acquired secondary meaning the Respondent is likely to be able to show that the domain name in question has been arrived at independently and accordingly cannot have been as a result of an Abusive Registration." (4.10, pp.15-16)
If anyone wants to get involved, be very cautious. My hunch is that - will all due respect to you, Anu - it makes for a much juicier tale to cook up some stuff about companies being held to "ransom" by people who've registered their trademarks or servicemarks as domains. I also imagine it won't be hard to find somebody who will profess real or exaggerated outrage at the sums of money being demanded for domain names which "only cost a fiver" or words to that effect.
And of course there is what I call the myth of the domain name "queue of one", namely that if entity X wasn't sitting on a domain it would be hanging around just waiting to be registered. For anything even remotely commercial, that's utter nonsense. I covered this at much greater length in this blog post.
http://www.webmastering.co.uk/domain-names/the-myth-of-the-domain-name-queue-of-one/
So good luck to you, Anu. I really, really hope the story you are trying to make portrays our
industry in the correct light. And it is an industry - make no mistake about it - globally billions of dollars worth of domains have traded hands over the last few years, and there are tens of thousands of people employed full time in roles associated with domain investing.
