.la Registrar sold me domain names that were "technically already reserved"

Back on June 13, I registered 8 domain names in the new .la domain. (See my triumphant posting here.)

However, some of the domains didn't work when I tried to forward them to URLs at my site. I sent an email to dreamhost, and I've now been informed that they "had a problem with our registration system on the 13th and 14th, and the http://www.la/ was erroneously giving out some domains that were technically already reserved..."

Three of the domains I registered work as expected; the five ones that don't work are:

active.la
insider.la
living.la
meet.la
run.la

The price for the first four was $50/year, the price for run.la was marked as "premium" at $100/year.

They inform me that they've refunded my money for those domains ($300), and are giving me an additional $50 credit. However, I had already started work on run.la, which I think would have been quite a popular site. I was looking forward to placing a personals service at meet.la, and various other services at the other domains.

Has anyone else had something like this happen to them?

Miscellania · Mon, 06/23/2003 - 20:42 · · Importance: 1

Comments

Our organization's ".la" domain has been deactivated, ostensibly for failure to renew the registration. However, we are acutally paid up for more than a year in advance.

DreamHost has not responded to our e-mails, faxes, or phone messages. We have heard that others are having similar problems with their ".la" domains.

Posted by: Richard Zvonar at Aug 27, 2003 1:34 PM

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