Why spend the money defending a $5 domain name, especially when you're not making any money by having it?

It's just a name, and if you're not a registered company, you're going to be seen as a squatter no matter what.

All I'm suggesting is to be prepared to have the domain ownership contested and have a backup if you have to change domains.

Also, the amount doesn’t matter; OP describes, in enough detail, that they are proud of this name.

Was it $5? I had the impression the OP paid more.

> I spent like a year or so to save up for it, which cost roughly 6 months of average net salaries in my country about 7 years ago.

They picked a bad registrar for a .com then, because they're dirt cheap.

They probably bought it from someone as it wasn't free at the time.

Correct. It was already registered and up for sale.

> All I'm suggesting

Not really, you are stating, matter of factly, that the big evil corp will own it and you are basically screwed. This is not true (in places I know, but might differ somewhere) if it’s not squatting and it’s actually your family name. It’s beyond reasonable.

Also, I find this capitalist overlord cynicism really quite annoying. I would help OP with legal fees to prevent this from happening. Just laying down and get pummelled just because it’s a big corp should not be the default.

That's kind of you, but will hopefully never be necessary.

> I spent like a year or so to save up for it, which cost roughly 6 months of average net salaries in my country about 7 years ago.

It wasn't $5.