Maybe here's an analogy: Verisign does something that YC doesn't like, so YC decides they don't trust being on .com anymore and they should move from ycombinat

Maybe here's an analogy: Verisign does something that YC doesn't like, so YC decides they don't trust being on .com anymore and they should move from ycombinator.com to ycombinator.party or something. They set up a web server that redirects from news.ycombinator.com to news.ycombinator.party, so that people who were looking for the old name still find it. Verisign decides that YC has abandoned the .com name, and points news.ycombinator.com at their own forum about news for hackers, with a target audience of fixed-point combinator enthusiasts. After all, "Y combinator" is just a term from a Haskell Curry paper. I think the norms around IRC are very similar to the norms around domains (or Twitter accounts, or so forth) - even if you use a somewhat generic name, whoever first lays claim to the name is entitled to keep it and do as much or as little with it, unless they affirmatively release it, and using the name to point someone elsewhere is definitely not abandoning it.