Godaddy Just Hit The Bottom Of My List

Not that I was a great fan off them ever really but, after some things I saw while trying to register a domain and reading one of the latest posts on TechCrunch I really have no time for them and will definitely not use or refer anyone to them.

So what is my gripe with them? Well, it surrounds their, as far as I am concerned, unethical practices when it comes to the registration and warehousing of domain names. I short while ago I went onto GoDaddy to register a .eu domain name as they were having some special deal on .eu domain names. Unfortunately the domain I was after was not available but, GoDaddy was offering me a nice little offer. I could sign up for an alert that will let me know the instant the domain name does become available.

Now some folks would jump at this and apparently some unscrupulous business people are making a good living doing this. For me, it just does not seem right. Some person out there forgets, or is not able to renew their domain name in time and within a 6 to 24 hour period after their domain name expires, it is snapped up by someone that might have absolutely no use for the name other then ripping the original owner off. Think of the absolutely horrible situation it places this other person in, especially if they relied on the domain name for business purposes.

To add fuel to this fire, here is an excerpt from the TechCrunch article:

Andrew Allemann over at Domain Name Wire has been doing an excellent job researching the hoops The Go Daddy Group jumps through to keep its shady tactics outside of the public view, resulting in this great blog post. Turns out The Go Daddy Group, which runs the world’s largest domain name registrar GoDaddy.com as well as some other domain name related companies, is apparently warehousing its customers’ expired domain names and directly profiting from them.

And then there is this little tit-bit:

 On August 16, 2005, GoDaddy formed a subsidiary called Standard Tactics, LLC in New Mexico. Before founding Standard Tactics, all of GoDaddy’s subsidiaries were incorporated in Arizona where the company is headquartered. There are a couple reasons GoDaddy may have chosen to form the company as a New Mexico limited liability company rather than an Arizona corporation. First, by creating the company in New Mexico it could distance itself from it. Second, by filing as a limited liability company instead of a corporation, it didn’t have to list directors of the corporation.

In fact, Standard Tactics LLC is a subsidiary of Special Domain Services Inc, which is a subsidiary of GoDaddy Inc, which is a subsidiary of The Go Daddy Group. See a pattern here? The only reason why we even know this is because the information got out when GoDaddy attempted to file for an IPO in 2006 (it eventually withdrew the filing).

So what do you think? Am I and the others overreacting? Is this all just business or is there some point at which one has to stand back and say, Hey wait a second, this can’t be right!”