It's kind of amazing how much certain data (in this case, a record in DNS) comes to mean to people. And how much we come to rely on that little bit of data. And really, how much we trust the DNS system and it's maintainers. "Ruling the world" might be difficult, but "ruling the internet" appears to be a matter of controlling DNS and then mimicking well-known sites well enough to install arbitrary software on every PC and device on the planet via a nefarious auto-update. It's the ultimate MITM attack. Even better if you can take over the DNS system for a short period, get a few million installs, then put the system back.

tl;dr: He who controls the DNS, controls the universe.

It's not who controls the spice, its the one who can disrupt the flow.

"setting it up to auto-renew"

Auto renew of course assumes that the credit card on file is current. If the email address is wrong and the cc doesn't work auto-renew obviously will fail. As anyone who has to charge credit cards on a repeat basis might tell you, cc's fail fairly frequently.

Since the domain (any domain) is important it's critical that someone manually also keeps track of the expiration date. And by the way if anyone thinks the answer to this is to renew for the max time period that opens up all sorts of problems in the future when the domain expires and people who were in charge years ago no longer exist and any current people aren't even aware that the domain needs to be renewed. This happens which is why there is an entire part of the domain business catering to what is known as "drop catching" deleted domain names and selling them back to the owners.

Isaac, blog.nodejs.org will need CNAME entry recreated as well.