In my experience, when a domain goes up for grabs, the registrar basically usurps it and auctions it off with first right of refusal having it under their stewardship in the first place as registrar. I saw this with
butash.com, of which I own .net and .org, but the dude that owned .com was old, and I think died finally. I had a godaddy domain update and saw it go up for sale as an auction on verisign, where he had it registered all these years (guess he never heard he could get a much better deal elsewhere). Some dude outbid me for like 700 bucks, said screw it, not that much worth it. Some year or so later had a buddy hit him up (so as not from
butash.net for obvious value), but the scab came back "we'll start bidding at $35K". He's been sitting on it since as I didn't put his kids through college and apparently no one else in my lineage has either.
So yes, verisign, godaddy, etc will all grab your shiz and sell it out from under you if they can, then the domain hoarder scabs soak them up hoping someone wants it back bad enough. Vermin, the whole lot, like zombies roaming the streets for brains. I was working at godaddy when Parsons figured out it'd be a huge market to do domain auctions and started that back in the day. I thought it was scummy having worked for him then, and didn't work for him much longer after.
-mb