The Industry

The Dot Me Domain Open Registration Whiners

Seems like there is a lot of confusion and finger pointing lately mostly about the Open Registration on July 17th.

We have a LOT more to write about this adventure - but a few words about the furor.

Now, I am no fan of GoDaddy, and think the website GUI is horrific, the founder too flamboyantly macho, and, well, that is what I think of GoDaddy. But a lot of people seem like they cannot read the rules of the game and/or have never used GoDaddy before and/or do not understand the practicalities of allocating constricted resources [domain names] to large numbers of feeders [buyers] in a short amount of time [minutes].

Anyway, here is more or less what I wrote on DnForum:

“Yesterday, GoDaddy’s website did no filtering of .me names that were already taken. You could sign up and pay for anything and they would charge the card and they would send a confirmation message. They let their backend do all the filtering and sorting of what names were available and who got first dibs. Then they sent out those emails that let us know that our registrations succeeded or failed.

The bigger scam is keeping the money for 2700 names going to auction at, say, 10 people for each auction times $100 which adds up to $2.7M for 2 months or so. ”

At 10% annual interest, this pays for lots of programmers to write the code while we twiddle our thumbs [the auction is starting a month late because their auction software was not working - or not even written yet?].

There has been some horrendously not-well-thought-through aspects to the process: like a separate login for each of the 100 domains one is bidding on [which they did remedy a week later] and the fact that bid increments are minimum $5, and if someone has bid a maximum of, say, $1825 above the current price, and because each time someone bids the auction is extended 1 day, regardless of whether it is the new high bid or not, someone could have the winning bid and yet the auction could still last for a year [e.g. if someone bids $5 more each day].

Usually, auctions get extended if there is a NEW HIGH BIDDER, not just whenever there is a new bid. And here they get extended by 24 hours. So, if someone wanted to be obnoxious, … not me, of course…. they could really gum up the works by prolonging these auctions almost indefinitely.

Here is GoDaddy’s response to this last bit of software tomfoolery:

“Dear Sir/Madam,
Currently our site states that “Any lead changes in the last 24 hours results in an automatic 24-hour extension of the auction.”. Entering a bid that is lower than your proxy bid does technically initiate a lead change as the new bidder is the leader of the auction until our system automatically places a new proxy bid for you. This means that there is a lead change in the auction price but not a leader change in the auction. Please let us know if you have any further questions regarding this matter.

Regards,
Mason G.
.ME Domain Auction Support
support@auctions.domain.me”