Sippin wrote:
Usually there's a grace period when a domain expires, allowing the original owner to re-acquire. But, clearly, someone at Sony with responsibility for maintenance of domain registrations is hiding under their desk atm.
Yeah. My understanding is that the contact email went into the bit bucket (or at least that is what they are claiming, you'd think someone at NS would have actually contacted Sony directly, but I suppose the process could just be automated or something). There's a ton of possible explanations, but I'd lean towards a scenario where some nutty networking engineer created an ugly spaghetti-like mess of network namespace interconnections and dependencies that only he really understood. It worked for years. Then he left the company and no one touched it because it was working. Add about 5 more layers of namespace redirection on top of that, and it's entirely possible that you'd not even realize that somewhere buried in the guts of your system was a dependency on the .net namespace.
I've seen this sort of thing happen. And you almost never find and fix such things until after they bite you. And you usually don't have a clue why it bit you either. You just yank out the old rats nest and replace it with something new and shiny and hope that in 10 years, that's not also going to look like a complete mess that only a crazy person would have constructed like that.