I think that's one reason why the group responsible for domain registrations changed their policy a few years ago so that when a domain expires, it gets deactivated a month (more?) before becoming available for sale to someone else. They reasoned that the longer the registration period and the bigger the organization, the less likely anyone in that organization will even KNOW who's supposed to be responsible for paying the renewal fee when the expiration date finally arrives. By deactivating it a month before it becomes available to anyone else to register, it gives the original owner time to notice it's not working, figure out who's supposed to take care of it, and get it renewed before someone else scoops it up.
I personally remember a few years ago, when I worked for a division of the company that used to be Worldcom. One of the domain names that was used for non-public things like the VPN and mail server ended up expiring, and at that point the company was in bankruptcy & more or less complete chaos reigned for a day or so because everyone who originally was responsible for taking care of things like that had long since been laid off or quit. It was exacerbated by the fact that since the DNS server worked for everyone accessing the internet from INSIDE the company, the only people who had problems were people trying to access it from the outside. And, of course, since everyone's ISPs had varying levels of respect for TTL and DNS caching, there was no single moment when it quit working for *everyone*. The calls came trickling in to the helpdesk, then kept coming and building up for hours until someone finally put 2 and 2 together & realized that the domain name had expired. Since the helpdesk staff were on the internal network, they couldn't replicate the problem because the DNS lookups DID work for them ;-)
