The lawsuit alleges the estate was renewed and should not have been sold at auction.
A high-profile expired domain auction for blockchain.ai ended today, but the former registrant filed a lawsuit, claiming it had renewed the domain.
In the lawsuit, Howard Gould said he was the registrant of the domain as of December 2017.
The domain was supposed to auto-renew with OnlyDomains, but the auto-renewal failed, causing the domain to expire on July 19, 2025.
After becoming aware of the failure on September 21, Gould claims to have paid OnlyDomains for the renewal and received confirmation.
On October 3, he emailed OnlyDomain asking why his bill was still labeled as pending. He also noticed that the domain was up for sale in a Namecheap auction.
The .ai domain registry, run by Identity Digital, has a partnership with Namecheap to sell expired domains through its auction platform. When the domain was about to be deleted, an auction was launched at Namecheap.
On October 6, OnlyDomains informed Gould that he would also have to pay a restoration fee for the domain. After paying the bills, he alleges the domain still went into PendingDelete status.
Gould, through an attorney, contacted Identity Digital on October 8 in an attempt to stop 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.
