GoDaddy is the biggest domain registrar in the world, including rogue states such as Russia and Belarus.
With tens of millions of domains registered at GoDaddy, the domain GoDaddy.com is one precious carrier of digital identities for third parties.
GoDaddy owns and operates Afternic, an aftermarket currently receiving a technology infusion from its little brother, the Uniregistry Market.
Afternic lists for sale domains for third parties and unlike NameFind, the GoDaddy-owned repository of acquired domains, Afternic caters to everyone willing to sell their domain.
It’s surprising that an Afternic lander performs no database checks whatsoever, simply listing any queried domain with the “potential” of being for sale. This wide-catching listing is bad, however, as the following lander for GoDaddy.com shows:
Naturally, this is terrible as a practice, and if the GoDaddy.com listing didn’t convince you, here’s a huge brand domain, that of Microsoft:
Still not convinced? How about inquiring about WhiteHouse.gov and its availability?
GoDaddy and Afternic should not display a dubious message like this; only domains in the “for sale” database at GoDaddy and Afternic should show up and be allowed to be queried for “potential availability.”
Sav and Dan should combine forces and kick the sh**&It out of GD and Sedo-their outrageous fees
Love Sav and DAn for their low fees
I thought you would believe anything is for sale at the right price. Both GD and Microsoft are public companies. You could buy them. The thing is that manually updating the url to show those domains isn’t how that page works by default. There are real use cases for it, like names being added but not through all the checks yet, or names we know are for sale but are using as tests, say Namefind. We are always testing stuff out. I don’t believe there is any real danger of someone being deceived by something like this. There is no path I am aware of from GD or AN that shows pages like this with these household names being for sale. You would have to go to the url, update it manually in the browser, see the domain “may” be for sale and then contact Afternic and get really mad at them. You said this “may” be for sale after I updated the url to put the domain name into it! Not really concerned that will happen or that anyone doing so would be taken seriously by the sales team.
PS hope to see you at Namescon 🙂
Plus I hope you can hear the sarcasm in my voice when you read this. 🙂 sometimes my humor is too dry and people don’t get Im
Saying if tongue in cheek.
Joe – I appreciate your chipping in. I think that while having an open marketplace for domains actually for sale is great, when an all-inclusive system isn’t following a simple ruleset (string is an actual domain and domain is actually for sale) then it becomes more of an SEO/spamming platform opportunity, and in this case I strongly believe you guys need to rethink its value.