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The .EU Landrush Fiasco
googleking writes "Bob Parsons, CEO and Founder of GoDaddy.com, has blogged about the .EU landrush fiasco. During the landrush phase for names which opened last Friday, established 'big name' registrars got exactly equal chances of registering names as did anyone who chose to bill themselves as a registrar. Bob asserts that hundreds of these new 'registrars' are actually fake fronts for a big name US company." From the article: "Here's how it works: All the accredited registrars line up and each registrar gets to make one request for a .EU domain name. If the name is available, the registrar gets the name for its customer. If the name is not available, the registrar gets nothing. Either way, after making the request, the registrar goes to the back of the line and won't get to make another request, until all the registrars in the line in front of it make their requests. This continues until all requests have been made and the landrush process is over ... The landrush process on the surface seems very fair. But there was something wrong with the process -- very wrong."
If there's a way to cheat, it will be found.
Sounds like Mr. Parsons is just upset he didn't think of making the phony baloney companies like his competitors did.
He lost out, and they'll definetly get away with it.
Sometimes scams pay out. Not any more unethical than him selling out to MS for his parked domains.
Did anyone expect anything else? It's kinda funny how naive they were, actually thinking that people would be "good" and play by the "rules".
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You don't understand?! If registrar X had 99 bogus registrars set up they get 100/second. That's more than 1/second.
Man, you really need that seminar!
So GoDaddy got outsmarted by somebody who gamed the system and now they're whining about it in the CEO's blog. Kwticherbitchin and figure out how to make money, not whine over lost opportunities.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
The landrush process on the surface seems very fair.
We apparently have radically different ideas of what counts as "fair".
established 'big name' registrars got exactly equal chances of registering names as did anyone who chose to bill themselves as a registrar
And what about Joe Jones and Sally Brown? Or more to the point, what about Steve McDonald, Cindy Frye, or Dan Walmart?
What you call "fair", I decry as massively biased right from the start. The very flaw you intend to point out, rather than making the process less fair, has imparted the only truly "fair" part of the entire dog-n'-pony.
I'll consider the process fair when humans get first choice, and trying to trademark common single English words carries the corporate death-penalty. Until then, let's not bother quibbling about whether conqueror-X or conqueror-Y managed to rape the most natives.
The TLD hijacking phenomenon that's a decade old profitable business model didn't suddenly stop that day. :-p
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Has anyone stopped to consider the source? Bob Parsons is notorious for his whining... Anyone who takes a gander at his blog every now and then is privy to the ex-Marine, poor-boy-done-good, megalomaniac either tooting his own horn, or complaining about the business practices of his competitors. Gimme-a-big-fat-Break!
I'm not fat, just big boned...
But the other 99 fake registrars don't need to re-issue requests made by the others (whether granted or not). So they not only can make more requests per second, but those requests are more likely to be still available.
A more efficient way to initially allocate major domain names might be to run an auction.
Currently, domain names are allocated according to the law of capture. He/she who first claims the domain name and pays a nominal fee has rights to the name. It IS like a land grab where you can acquire the rights to land by just showing up, except it's even worse because to grab land in the American West you generally had to show up and use it.
My rough idea:
(1) Auction period will last one month
(2) At the end of the auction period, domain names that were bid on will go to the highest bidder. (As long as bid is above the minimum bid.) (3) After the auction ends, domain names will be allocated under the old retarded process
This doesn't solve all domain name problems, but it would get popular domain names to the people/companies that value the name the most.
There seems to be a special place in the liberal heart for the notion of queues and everyone lining up for their "fair share" of whatever is being doled out. It sounds like a good idea in principle, but in practice this type of scheme inevitably falls victim to the realities of human nature. I remember experiencing something like this first hand when the housing authority at my university decided that a limited number of subsidized campus housing units would be doled out based upon a queue system. Of course, they thought that everyone would be nice and orderly, but in practice people camped outside the office for days before the rush began with one person "holding" spaces for twenty of his friends and people buying and selling places in line. They opened the process at midnight and everyone rushed the doors. The campus police were overwhelmed and they were lucky that there wasn't a riot. The point of all this is that the market has demonstrated time and again that queuing and rationing ultimately fail to satisfy anyone as somebody will always get the short end of the stick even though they would have paid more for item x than item y. Instead of trying to enforce some silly queuing system where people can and will find ways to cheat why did they not have an auction instead? Obviously some names like sex.eu are going to be worth hell of a lot more than blog.eu so why not let competing bidders determine exactly how much more? They could have used the proceeds to create a holding company for long term management of the domain and offer whatever names that were left at a fixed price. The conservative Europeans should have known better than to try and create a non-price based system that could not be abused by those crafty American companies and their high priced consultants.
I don't have the figures (any economists please? google?) but I am pretty sure that the Euro-zone of countries is now similar to North America in its size as a market for products. I'm pretty sure that countries in the Euro-zone often have similar product specifications due to common laws as well, so yup, I'd say branding your product as .eu is as important as a .com.
.com products, hey, I don't want to pay for a company to ship a paperback 3000 miles from the USA, I'd prefer them to post it from somewhere in the EU and charge me that instead (pretty well the same rate as from the UK). Don't have to pay import taxes either...
I'm in the UK and I purposely *avoid*
No, you don't.
That is misleading, the point is each of the registrars have equal change of connecting make request every second.
A registrar following the spirit of the rules has 1 request/sec.
A registrar with 99 fraud registrars has 100 request/sec.
Think of the line as 1 second. Every time you make a request you go to the end of the "line." Someone with 99 shell registrars goes to the end of the "line." By the time he gets to the front of the 1 second line, their 99 other requests have also been processed.
Man, you really need that seminar!
-Kurt
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007