A couple weeks later, Chilehead, it seems more likely to me that Garmin would put up a "we're closing down opencaching.com" page along with an explanation, and a link to Geocaching.com.
Hey, new developement. I opened a free account at dnsstuff.com in anticipation of buying another domain or two to point to this website. You know, they have a bunch of dns tools for domain name owners. I was NEVER aware that you could get historical dns records. Your basic WHOIS lookup only ever tells you the current domain name owner, although you can see the original date of registration (September 15th, 2003, in the case of Opencaching.com).
Well, imagine my surprise that you can see the historical records there! Here they are:
Name Server History
Event Date Action Pre-Action Server Post-Action Server
2003-09-15 New -none- Nameresolve.com
2006-10-26 Transfer Nameresolve.com Powerhosting.com
2007-01-25 Transfer Powerhosting.com Dsredirection.com
2010-09-15 Transfer Dsredirection.com Garmin.com
The original opencaching.com expired 2005-09-15. So Opencaching.com was freely available from then until 2006-10-26, when a domain name squatter bought it. It was transferred to another domain name squatter, overseedomainmanagement.com 2007-01-25. Garmin bought it from them, and likely paid several hundred to a couple thousand dollars for the domain name opencaching.com.
Thus, Opencaching.com was not freely available for anyone in the opencaching network to snap up from 2006-10-26 until the day Garmin acquired it, including our founder RVRoadTrip. He or anyone else would have had to pay several hundred to a couple thousand dollars for it.
Fun facts:
-Garmin owns 325 domain names
-Garmin has registered all 325 on markmonitor.com, a "brand protection" registrar. In otherwords, Mr.Yuck isn't going to be sitting on his computer logged in to his GoDaddy.com account on September 15th, 2014, and "steal" opencaching.com from under their nose.
-Opencaching.net and Opencaching.org have both been owned by domain name squatters since 2005, although two different ones.