According to mdwcomm.com, the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) forgot to renew the domain name, FDOTDocuments.com, “which is featured on their new Toll-By-Plate billing mailers! and is now owned by Germans”

Actually a company from Germany  “DomCollect AG” which the author of the article describes as a company which “has a history of domain hijacking” is now the owner of the domain and is using it as a parked page .

Of course, we know that DomCollect didn’t “hijack” the domain they just picked it up after the geniuses running the site for the government forgot to pay the $10 a year to renew the domain.

“This mistake could severely cost the State of Florida… who knows how many of these Toll-By-Plate mailers have already been printed and mailed with the wrong information!” says  the article.

As those in the domain industry know, its certainly not a rare occurrence that someone loses a domain name they had no intention of losing.

Guess no one wants to renew their domain name out more than one year at a time, even governments who actually can afford the $100 to take the domain registration out for 10 years.

The domain name has an Alexa ranking in the top 2.5 million of all sites and a Compete.com rank higher than 245,000 so the author is right that some serious traffic meant for the state is going elsewhere and drivers who use the site are probably confused as hell as to what is going on.

The fact that some of the top domainers in the world live in Florida make it even worse for the state, which could have hired one of a domainer’s who lives in the state to watch over the state’s domain assets.

Of course that would make too much sense for any government.

Hat Tip: Scott Ross