I just got a renewal notice for Nogators.com from Register.com, Verisign’s domain registrar.

“Hrm,” I thought, “I was sure I transferred that to GoDaddy last year!” So I checked. And I did. Register.com has no hold on that domain, as they are no longer the registrar for it, and haven’t been since October of 2004. It would therefore be useless for me to renew the domain with Register.com — except, of course, to Register, who would get my payment in exchange for nothing. Furthermore, it’s trivial to discover who the registrar is for any given domain — it has to be for the Internet to function correctly. Ergo, there are two possible conclusions we may draw from this:

• Possibility A: Verisign knows they don’t have the domain anymore, but elected to send out the renewal notice anyway just in case doing so would extract additional funds from me without having to provide any service in return; or
• Possibility B: Verisign do not realize they no longer have this domain, and consequently are demonstrably so out of touch as to call into question why any educated consumer might want to do business with them.

Either way: Charming.