See Nissan Motors v Nissan Computers. Companies could simply email their registrar and say someone is squatting on their domain and registrars would acquiesce.

See Nissan Motors v Nissan Computers. Companies could simply email their registrar and say someone is squatting on their domain and registrars would acquiesce. Nissan Computers set the legal meaning of squatting which pretty much ended that practice. Before that you were much better off using a registrar with a known dispute process (verisign) or in a jurisdiction which required a legal precedent (German registrar joker.com leapfrogged into stardom during this time) Also the process of locking domains came out of these actions