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GoDaddy VP Caught Bidding Against Customers
An anonymous reader writes "A GoDaddy Vice President has been caught bidding against customers in their own domain name auctions. The employee Adam Dicker isn't just any GoDaddy employee; he's head of the GoDaddy subsidiary that controls the auctions.
Dicker won some of the domains he bid for, and pushed up the bid price on auctions he didn't win. The conflict of interest is unethical, but could this practice also be illegal? Said a representative for a competitor, 'Even if controlled, that practice has bad news written all over it.'
This comes hot on the heels of news that despite earlier promises to ICANN to end their 60-Day ban on transfers, GoDaddy quietly circumvented it by forcing customers to agree to the ban anyway. ICANN doesn't appear to be investigating or asking follow-up questions about this. What can be done to force ICANN to police the registrars for which it is responsible?"
Far be it from me to defend GoDaddy, but bidding on one's own auctions is, as far as I know, a common business practice. Unethical, but not the slightest bit illegal. (IANAL)
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
... and it is, roughly speaking, illegal as hell in many jurisdictions.
Pay a Congressman.
Cheers!
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
At a minimum, get the word out so everyone knows about it. Also, vote with your dollars by taking your business elsewhere.
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
I would ditch my 200+ domains at GoDaddy in a heartbeat.
The company is rife with unethical business practices.
I have experienced this same thing where GoDaddy bid against me in an auction.
They will also purposely not update your contact information / credit information for certain domains where they can grab them and sell them off at a profit. Which has also happened to me.
For whatever reason, there doesn't seem to be an equal price competitor to GoDaddy. That's a shame as there are many people who want to leave.
What an appropriate last name!
Wow, if Charles Dickens were writing today, he'd be all over that name.
Adam Dicker, quicker with the clicker than the clients he dicks o'er
Mr. Pinchloaf, known as a tight-ass most horribly, whose pucker snaps shut audibly
Nadia Rotchacokoff, who gives her love freely and her diseases venerally
Steve Ballmer, a rabid wombat would be much calmer, screaming, hurling chairs against the wallmer
President Bush and Vice President Dick, with names like that, someone's getting fucked right quick
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
More like ICANN'T!
Why is anyone surprised at unethical behaviour by GoDaddy?
It is common practice at GoDaddy to bid on domains and resell them. So much so that the unwritten word was to open an account under a family members name in order to make it harder to trace back to yourself.
In other words, you would take a stand on principle, but not if it costs you a bit more money. Heh.
The whole domain name market has gotten out of control. Most unused domain names are now being used as nothing more than garbage linklists to generate ad revenue, while they sit at auction sites for $1,000 or more. It amazes me to think these garbage sites can generate more revenue than it costs to register the name. And then to sit on these names waiting for thousand dollar payoffs is outrageous. If ICANN intends domain names to be like real-estate then they need to provide permanent ownership. Otherwise they need to raise their own registration fees to prevent this kind of domain abuse. I for one tire of Google searches that return a list of b.s. sites.
:T:R:A:N:S:
Can anyone recommend a reputable alternative registrar that is similar in terms of pricing but without the "evil"?
With this recent disclosure, I can no longer trust them. In my opinion, unethical is not a strong enough word to describe the act being reported.
They've got to pay for those Superbowl adverts somehow. :)
These are nothing, remember when they stopped using Apache, only to go for IIS ?
http://revj.sourceforge.net
I used GoDaddy to register two domains and the whole process was spread on too many steps because at each step they bombard the buyer with advertisements for extra paid services in a very persistent way. This approach along with the site design look so chabby that it's not surprising the least that they would engage in such practice. Whether it's legal/ethical or not is a different story after all an auction is a process designed to reach a fair price that the buyer agrees to pay. It does not make a lot of difference who bid against the buyer because no one forced to him to pay this price. The big problem is that in this case GD have big advantage because if they bid too high and the real buyer does not increase the price then they do not lose a lot but in a real auction if you bit on your items and no one overbids then you would have to buy the item and pay the auction house commission out of your own pocket which might be a substantial percentage of the sale price.
ICANN is a TERRIBLY badly managed organization, in my opinion.
I'm keeping a list of stories about GoDaddy on Slashdot, in order by date:
Go Daddy Usurps Network Solutions (2005-05-04)
GoDaddy Serves Blank Pages to Safari & Opera (2005-12-08)
GoDaddy.com Dumps Linux for Microsoft (2006-03-23)
GoDaddy Holds Domains Hostage (2006-06-17)
GoDaddy Caves To Irish Legal Threat (2006-09-16)
MySpace and GoDaddy Shut Down Security Site (2007-01-26)
That incident prompted this web site:
Exposing the Many Reasons Not to Trust GoDaddy with Your Domain Names. According to this March 11, 2008 story in Wired, GoDaddy shut down an entire web site of 250,000 pages because of one archived mailing list comment: GoDaddy Silences Police-Watchdog Site RateMyCop.com. See below for Slashdot's story about RateMyCop.com.
Alternative Registrars to GoDaddy? (2007-02-03)
GoDaddy Bobbles DST Changeover? (2007-03-11)
850K RegisterFly Domains Moved To GoDaddy (2007-05-29)
GoDaddy Silences RateMyCop.com (2008-03-12)
ICANN Moves Against GoDaddy Domain Lockdowns (2008-04-08)
GoDaddy VP Caught Bidding Against Customers (2008-06-29)
Any error or stories not included?
GoDaddy's reputation is not just one of a negative stories. In my opinion, GoDaddy tries to confuse non-technical people by offering services they don't need that are presented as valuable.
Here are some of the opinions of Bob Parsons, the owner of GoDaddy. He is pro-violence: Close Gitmo? No way!!
I have about a hundred domains with GoDaddy.
This is the last straw - the company is entirely unethical and I wish to no longer support them, or take chances that their unethical bullshit will one day burn me.
The reason I originally chose GoDaddy (which was quite a while ago when they were smaller) was because they had good prices and seemed reputable enough. If anyone has any auggestions on where the best place to move my domains to would be I woluld love to hear it.
I would like to avoid Network Solutions and their ilk, between their pricing, alphabet agency ties (and other things) it does not appeal to me - I would also like to avoid small fly-by-night "register your domain for 69 cents" places that may disappear or be purchased by other companies. Basically I am hoping to find a reputable, ethical registrar.....Any suggestions?
"The company I buy my domains from...
But you don't even say which one... what a dork!
Go... Daddy.
Invenio via vel creo
Slghtly off topic, I just renewed a domain on GoDaddy for a year. Other than being offered additional domains, I did not have to agree to a 60 day lockdown, just the terms of service. I read the TOS and didn't see anything about the 60 days. So it may be gone.
http://nodaddy.com/ has plenty of GoDaddy horror stories, along with recommendations and experiences for alternative companies. I say that we should all boycott GoDaddy.
Transferred my last seven domains away from that awful place. I can't stand their attitude and customer-unfriendly literal interpretations of ICANN's rules.
The last straw was when they were going to cancel my domains because my phone number was invalid. "Update immediately or we will seize your domains!" an ominous email reported.
Well, my area code changed and well -- there you have it!
Rather than let them "seize" my domains, I moved them over to another registrar. They are much smaller (only maybe half a million domains), but they are so less bullshit than GoDaddy...
Milstein Weiss, can't you profit from this?
Oh the poor customers... But aren't those situations actually caused by the customer who let the domain name expire in the first place? I've used GoDaddy for quite some time now and so far I'm pretty happy with their services.
I also wonder if this accusation actually holds any real facts. I mean; its all based on a single forum post by someone who thinks to be dealing with the guy from GoDaddy. But I have to wonder; how many people called "Adam Dicker" live in Canada? So how can you be sure its really him?
our overbidding VP.
GoDaddy keeps all the spoils to themselves Which means that his bidding was driving up the auction house's income. It's illegal as hell in any state I can think of.
lol
I can't believe GoDaddy is still in business. I can't remember ever reading anything good about them and every time I do see some article, it's always about their unethical business practices.
However, I think the core of the problem is that something ICANN needs to sort out by forbidding the resale or auction of domain names. They should only be allowed to be leased from accredited registrars at a fair price, with clear restrictions on artificially inflating the price. IMHO, the auDA has got this right for all .au domains.
By reading this signature, you hereby agree with the content of the above comment.
they're $15 for com/net/org domains and offer custom dns and mail hop/relay services at varying prices. dns changes propagate quickly, and their servers are stable and reliable...
at the end of the day, you get what you pay for, so why would anyone be surprised that the street whore of registrars would actually try and fuck over their clientele?
three can keep a secret, if two are dead - benjamin franklin
get an enom reseller account for $9.95 or something. if youre lucky, you can get one for $8.95
Read radical news here
for the love of god, have you been living in a cave ?
a great majority of hosting industry uses enom.com . its probably the biggest registrar out there. the only problem is acquiring a reseller account, because they dont sell like godaddy. but, you can acquire an account either directly through them by depositing a huge chunk of cash, or from their levle 2 resellers.
Read radical news here
What can be done to force ICANN to police the registrars for which it is responsible?
What can be done to police ICANN?
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Well, it sounds like you have more bidding experience than I do. Currently I refuse to do business with Ebay, for example, due to some of their ethics practices.
Still, I view it in terms of game theory and statistics.
For example, I think that selling popular concert tickets(you know, the 'sold out in 5 minute' types) at dutch auction would be a good idea. You put your bid in, knowing that you won't be screwed, in that you'll end up paying the same as everybody else. At the same time, you're encouraged to bid as high as you can stand - in order to make sure you get the tickets. Incidentally, especially if you keep 1-2% of tickets back for sale on-site, this will also take care of most scalping problems.
Generally speaking - I view it as a contest. The bidders want to get the item for as cheap as possible, the seller wants to sell it for as much as possible. There are many ways to do this, from the fast talking cattle auction to a days long silent written bid auction for something like a collection of artwork.
Finally, keep this in mind: An item is only worth what you can get somebody to pay for it.
I don't read AC A human right
I've taken a lot of shit over the years for suggesting Netsol is still the only safe place to
have domains.
Congratulations, you caught one. Now what about the others? It's been a decade, after all.
I may not like Netsols rules but at least they stick to them, Even 12 years ago it was in the company rulebook said anybody doing this would be terminated instantly. And sued.
Need Mercedes parts ?
If domain names were covered by the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) there might be imputed into the contract an obligation on the part of GoDaddy to engage in good faith behaviour. But it is unclear whether domain name rental falls under the UCC, and the UCC is not all that U(niform) across the states.
I've been using changeip.com for dynamic DNS and have had no problems with it. Domain name registration is $15 (or $13 if you have more than one) and adding Dynamic DNS is $6.
This Dicker guy is a shitball like most people in the domain business. GoDaddy should have known when they hired him. He made his fortune selling pirated satellite equipment, then after being busted parlayed his money into cybersquatting, profiting from little kids on domains like SpongebobSquarepants.com
"Oh those were his personal activities..."
"He didn't look at other people's bids..."
BULLSHIT
This guy is an asshole with a history of ripping people off.
If you can't afford $400 a year to not deal with scumbags, get out of whatever business you're in. Scambags always screw you over in the end.
So, what business are you in that doesn't require dealing with scum bags? I've held enough jobs (and just plain been around long enough) to know they are everywhere. I've even run across a few on slashdot but I still come back (though, admittedly, less and less).
Let's not get so much righteous indignation that we throw away someone else's $400 frivolously.
I don't have too much to say on the front of Go Daddy sucking other than they are owned by parent company Demand Media, founded by the man who gave us MySpace. Everything this company does is about screwing the customer (pardon me, the user, the customer even on the pay-sites they now own are advertisers), shady dealing with the government, click-fraud, or ad revenue at the expense of content. If I may put my tinfoil hat on for a moment, I would be inclined to believe that any site that DM wants to add to their empire is more likely to fall victim to this as certain well-known domains could/could have be/been cranked up to unaffordable renewal prices and then a "buyout" offered for the site's content to come with it. Moral of the story, avoid Demand Media at all costs.
Adam was a domain investor well before becoming a godaddy Vp and that is and was quite well known. Considering his salary is likely a fraction of what he earns in parking/investment revenue I'm very sure it was well know to Bob that he wasn't going to quit investing. His position doesn't give him any advantage over anyone else. Having more money than most of the bidders might though. This might actually be a story rather than a case of sore loser if it were found that he was not allowing names to go to auction or something along those lines.
http://forums.nodaddy.com/index.php?topic=272.msg1163
This solitary post on a "nodaddy.com" forum ( sense a bias perhaps? ) is considered adequate source material for such accusations?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I think this is unacceptable. Who offers services of godaddy level that I can move my many domains to? I don't want to give them another dollar.
My boss had this happen to him too. They tried to bill an outdated card, instead of the good card numbers that they had, didn't notify him, and sold the domain to a cyber-squatter. He wasn't very happy with GoDaddy at the time.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
I'm aware of several people who refer to the company as "The GoDaddy Spam Support Service" due to the earnest embrace and willingness to work with the worst people on the Internet. It's pretty obvious that they have no ethics of any kind and will do ANYTHING to make money -- including ripping off their own customers. The sooner people abandon them entirely (not that some of their competitors are much better), the better it'll be. (And don't even get me started on their offensively sexist commercials.)
> He takes a position at GoDaddy AS HEAD OF AFTERMARKET DOMAIN NAMES a few Months ago and its news now that he buys Aftermarket domain names WHICH IS ILLEGAL IN ALL FIFTY STATES?
Fix'd!
Well, sorry to say, but when someone is on the inside that knows more then the average joe about information that can get them profits more then they would have normally, they call it insider information and I believe that it carries a minimum 5 year sentence in some parts of the US. Where did you say your VP resides again?
And if you [ go under a bus / get blown up / fall out with your customer / get overwhelmed ] all your customers will bitterly wish that they had gone with godaddy.
I had a friend do what you did and he totally frazzed out under the stress, his "micro" business went under.
One of my associates, his customer, had to go to the hosting company and pay them so he could get his servers out; but before that it was a mad drive across country to find the guy who had just dropped off the map.
Sam
blog.sam.liddicott.com
What worries me a little about the post is that all bad news about GoDaddy seem to come from a single source: NoDaddy.com. That doesn't discount them, but I can tell you from my own experience that GoDaddy is a lot better than RegisterFly.
Just looking at their commercials, I would never have guessed they were scumbags.
I would never had guessed they were domain registrars either, now that you mention it.
I've had no problems with MyDomain.com. Yearly renewal at $9/yr. This includes email redirection; you can specify that various email addresses get redirected to different addresses, and a "none of the above" wildcard email address goes to yet another address you specify. It's great having disposable email addresses. (Unfortunately, doesn't do wildcard matching.)
Web sites get directed to their web server which consists of a single frame filling the page, and the contents of the frame are whichever web site you want to redirect it to. (You can also get it to actually point to another web site, but I haven't tried this so I can't say anything about it.)
I signed up with them because I was impressed by the technical support forums, which are open to non-customers. This was a few years ago; hope they're still just as good.
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
Worked for a Seattle company in the domain name business that did a lot of business with G-Daddy. Both companies and the guys who ran them struck me as being somewhat on the shady side. Just not very professional in my opinion. And this story just bares out my opinion.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
Elizabeth, that's not really the question.
The fact that this was an insider bidding on auctions is a small part of what's wrong with the domain registrar business. Domain registrars have a clerical position. They have special access to ICANN and the root nameservers and have an inside track on those domains and their ownership.
A registrar can just not release an expired domain and then it's unavailable for registration by others. It seems likely this is how godaddy got the domains that were being auctioned, in essence by misappropriating them.
Given that, registrars should *all* be prohibited from buying, selling, brokering, owning or otherwise trading in those domains. The special access registrars have makes this essential. Expired domains belong to someone, either the expired owner, or the public. The only entity that clearly doesn't own them is the registrar. The registrar didn't think up the domain name, didn't publicize it, build traffic, link to it, they did nothing. They got paid to make the original registration entry on behalf of their customer, as a contractor. If the customer failed to pay for the renewal and a registrar just kept the property instead of releasing it to be registered by the public they are essentially stealing it.
I point to automobile repossession law of most states for your guidance. If a car is repossessed because the owner didn't pay off his loan of $5000, and the car is subsequently sold for it's true value of $10,000, the owner gets the extra money. The car loan company is not enriched by their grabbing it and successfully selling it. The law is the same for real estate. Why should domain names be different? Many are equally valuable.
As to godaddy, where did godaddy get the domains they were auctioning that day? Did they own them or were they selling them on behalf of another party, and not an alter ego of godaddy. If it's found the domains being auctioned were misappropriated from godaddy's previous customers who had let those domains expire godaddy should be sanctioned.
If godaddy wants to buy and sell domains on it's own account they should give up their registrar business and they would then be free to do so.
ICANN is a weak organization, they are dominated by the registrar industry and are ethically challenged in their job of *regulating* that industry. ICANN can't detect clear conflicts of interest, can't even detect blatant theft on the part of the industry they are supposed to be regulating. That's the problem that needs to be fixed. I'm not holding my breath.
.
Then allow mine to be the first.
I have several domains registered with eNom. I originally chose them because their resellers offered a fairly complete package (DNS, web & email forwarding, etc.) for a competitive price. Turned out that the specific reseller I went with opened a reseller account for me as well, which simplified things a bit when family members needed their own domains, but I digress...
The problems started when I discovered that I was missing some important emails.
After quite a bit of back and forth with eNom and my 3rd party email provider, it turned out that eNom had set up aggressive "spam filters" on their email forwarding service and silently dropped anything that triggered them.
The funny part was that I was still getting dozens spam messages (which my 3rd party email provider's caught with >99% success) but some legitimate messages were silently nuked.
I finally managed to get high enough on eNom's support to get real answers. They flatly refused to fix it in any of the ways I suggested:
- Allow people to opt out of their spam filtering.
- Quarantine the messages for a set amount of time instead of dropping them, with online access.
- Send the recipient a summary of messages that were dropped (title, sender and date).
- Send a bounce message to the sender of the alleged spammer.
They readily admitted that the bandwidth it saves them outweighs any concerns of false positives. They just don't care.
My only recourse was to use a different DNS provider so I ended up paying extra for something that should have been included in the package.