That's awful. So someone pays them them, builds a website on their property and they still have you by the balls. I guess you'd only rent to add a redirect over to a new domain.

I've just tried negotiating with a squatter. I'm trying to resurrect a web game with a few thousand players which the original dev neglected. I've rebuilt it on another domain but the community have game data stored in the browser localStorage against the original site. I offered US$200 and was told no - not even a counter offer. I believe they see the domains as lotto tickets - it's in their interests to let a lot of the negotiations fall though so they can win big on a few massive deals.

Whats the game?

I guess that's yet another problem of the web platform - data locked to individual operators and not available to others even when the user wants it to be.

Write an app to extract the data client side.

it doesn't work this way with normal dev tools, since local storage is scoped by the domain, other domains can't see whats in your storage

TBF, there's no way that $200 is profitable for them to deal with the hassle of selling. IME offers only start to get accepted once you are in the range of $2000+