Comment by zarzavat
5 days ago
This reminds me of the business practices of the Austrian NIC. Usually domain names expire if you don't renew them. In Austria, unless you explicitly cancel the domain name by fax, they just roll the registration over to the next year and then send you to collections[1] if you don't pay up.
There's no rule that domain names expire unless you renew them, at least for ccTLDs. It's just a convention. Conventions lead to assumptions, and assumptions can be used to scam people.
In general there's two types of businesses: businesses where you pre-pay (e.g. McDonalds), and businesses where you post-pay (e.g. a sit-down restaurant). If you take a conventionally pre-pay service and apply post-pay pricing to it, you have yourself a perfect scam.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1bnjus/the_austri...
This would not surprise me with a German service provider, although it got much better in the last decade.
They do that or they did that? (you are linking to a decade old post)
Seems like they still do:
https://www.nic.at/en/how-at-works/domain-holder#id105
> I received a letter from the debt collection agency. What can I do?
> If a domain hasn't been paid for despite several payment reminders from nic.at, the domain shall be locked and the open claim handed over to our debt collection agency. As a result, the invoice must be paid directly to the debt collection agency. Please contact our debt collection agency for more information
Like TFA it's hard to tell if they genuinely believe that they are helping their customers by not discontinuing their service, or if it's a scam. I suspect a mixture of both.
It's both. It's normal business practice in the German-speaking countries (a.k.a. DACH) that would be considered a scam anywhere else.
Basically, in most countries paying money is something that requires continuous enthusiastic consent - if you don't pay, that's the business's problem and they should stop serving you, and they may only recover payment for goods they've already given you and not received payment for. But in DACH, it only requires technical consent - if you signed something saying you'll give them money, then you have to give them that money, and you cannot rescind your obligation to pay, except as provided in the contract or an overriding law.
You went to Austria and did Austrian business with an Austrian company, you should be aware that Austrian rules and norms apply. ccTLDs are not generic, every country is free to apply any rules on their ccTLD!
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There are, in fact, absolutely no US-imposed rules about how a country manages its ccTLD like there are on gTLDs (words).
By "US-imposed" you presumably mean ICANN-imposed.
Yes? ICANN is part of the US, and has been strong-armed by the US government into imposing restrictive rules on gTLDs even though they appear like they're global.
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