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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?"
... 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
Its Certainly Unethical, sometimes illegal. Where I Live, If you do it in Real Estate Auctions, you can loose any profits, and get a few fines, Auctioneer can loose their license.
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.
it should be illegal (depends where you live).
if you want a minimum price then set a reserve, not all this BS.
or just make this a law; if you are in any way financially associated with the auction, it must be declared on every bid you make.
otherwise, how is this not bait and switch or thuggery?
thug: "give me $10!"
person takes out wallet containing $30
thug: "give me $30!"
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. :)
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.
If it's up front and the bidder identifies him/herself as a such, it should be O.K. What borders on fraud is the possibly deviant nature of the bidding. I only see this tactic as a way to artificially increase the potential value of a domain. I have no pity for domain speculation or domain squatters. This will certainly be bad for Godaddy's reputation.
Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the author.
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?
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.
Don't set a reserve, set the minimum bid. I never got he point of a reserve, its just a hidden minimum bid. Buyers should be able to see the minimum amount they would have to pay for something. Hiding it is just dishonest.
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...
The question is whether it's just for the government to enforce "ethical" or "moral" behavior that doesn't directly harm others. Examples include bidding on one's own auctions, lying, and cheating on one's spouse.
Its = possessive. It's = "it is"
A reserve verses a minimum bid works in that lower amounts of bids can be placed to sort of determine a value of the item without an influence of the seller. A reserve price doesn't influence the end price and locks out some people not sure about taking a risk.
If you were selling a T-shirt or a book signed by someone famous and set a reserve price, I can offer money below the reserve comparable to what I think it might be worth to me. Someone else comes around and offers more and so on until the reserve price is met and/or the auction closes. with a reserve price, you are saying essentially it is worth at least this much. If I disagree, I have no change of being persuaded otherwise by others biding it up. I also won't want to go much over the minimum bid because it already costs that much.
To me, and probably a lot of others, the reserve signifies that you need to get that much out of it to recover costs or make it worth your while to sell it. A minimum bid seems more like going to the corner store and attempting to outspend another customer on the purchase of the last snickers bar in the store. In the previous, you can change your mind on the reserve, in the later, we know the worth is $1.25 (whatever) and will eventually reach a point where it is easier to simply go somewhere else and get it.
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.
At least to me, your minimum/starting bid is the same as what you said.
I think that reserve amounts are set in the hope of getting a 'bidding war' started, get more people interested and bidding, and therefore end up running the price above what the item would have sold for with a minimum bid.
I don't read AC A human right
It may be legal, but it is unethical.
And when you are a registrar, by far your most important asset is trust. GoDaddy no longer has mine, and I will no longer recommend them.
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.
Indeed. I was a big GoDaddy fan until I found out they are the largest domain squatters in the world. Then I did some shopping around and found out I was paying $20/year for WhoIS privacy protection that my webhost / registrar includes for free with every domain.
I've attempted many times to migrate my main domain away from GoDaddy to my current webhost and for some reason it fails. The webhost says that GoDaddy is blocking the transfer - even though I've unlocked the domain and followed the rules.
Come to find out, it's due to the fact that I renewed it less than 60 days ago... now I get to wait.
This story is just another reason to suspect the largest and most visible company in the particular market - absolute power corrupts.
Well, in the simplest terms you are wrong, but the explanation is more complicated.
Knowing allowing shill bidding (whether by yourself or others) is cause for revocation of an auctioneer's license or fines by state regulators. The state law most often says that a business cannot conduct auctions without an auctioneer's license, so the leverage for fines and punishment is generally against continued ability to conduct auctions and not strictly a legal matter aside from maybe breach of contract claims or similar.
Shilling itself may or may not be illegal state by state, but just because you can't go to jail for it alone does not preclude you having your ass handed to you in a courtroom. Again, you can be sued under breach of contract or for violation of the UCC for which law may allow certain claims.
In this particular case, ICANN probably has some type of contract governing the auctions that GoDaddy is probably also violating. I would imagine that their hole is pretty deep in this matter.
reserves are not known by the people in the auction. minimum bids are. when the information available to you changes, so does the 'game theory'.
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
I generally am never on the owning side of an auction. I'm typically on the bidding side with the exception of one thing that went through a real auction house which I got roughly 200 times what I expected.
But from my perspective, a reserve means I need to cover at least this much or I take a loss. A minimum bid says it is worth this much at least. Perhaps it is more perspective then anything and some could be wanting to start a bidding war. And your right in that the reserve promotes bidding were it wouldn't be possible with a minimum bid. All the auctions I have been to, the reserve price has always been a secrete until after the item has been auctioned too. It might be different at some auctions but from my perspective, I see it differently. I can see however, where your opinion is just as valid if not more giving some insight into the owner's mental workings as mine.
BTW, the piece I auctioned was an antique dresser I got as partial payment for helping the family of an elderly neighbor clean up after she passed on. I only took the thing because they were talking about not having any place to store it and they didn't like the looks of it. I traded $25 of the $125 I got for moving stuff into a truck after they packed it up and it sold for $7,000 plus at auction because the maker was local and in demand. I though it would bring a couple hundred or maybe even close to a grand if someone was crazy. I never saw seven grand coming from it.
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
That's pretty much what I said, right?
I put item X up for auction. I want at least $20 for it. If I put a minimum bid on it I get one guy who puts $20 down on it. Or I set a $20 reserve, bidders 1-10, smelling a deal start bidding, it quickly exceeds $20, but since 1-10 were already looking at it, at least some have their competitive side awake and are looking for a 'win'. Next thing you know it sells for $50.
I don't read AC A human right
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
agreed
Unethical, but not the slightest bit illegal.
You sure about that? From Wikipedia, on Shills in Auctions:
Shill bidding may be a common practice on eBay. In his book Fake: Forgery, Lies, & eBay, Kenneth Walton describes how he and his cohorts placed shill bids on hundreds of eBay auctions over the course of a year. While many sellers consider shill bidding a harmless act, some believe that it may violate federal or state laws. Walton and his associates were charged and convicted of fraud by the United States Attorney for their eBay shill bidding.
Yup. Sounds pretty illegal so far.
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
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.
Well, I won't do business with them if this is how they operate.
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
Reserves are just a play on words to try to trick buyers. The only difference is whether the bid is rejected before or after the auction is completed. It is dishonest, and it should be illegal. The people using reserves can tell themselves how they are not lying about what the real minimum bid is, but since there is no other reason for a reserve other than to trick people into thinking that their bid is valid, the people setting reserves are just rationalizing their immoral behaviour.
Reserves are the main reason I quit even bothering with e-bay. I got tired of bidding on something, and then 3 days later, finding out that the person selling the item had dismissed my bid before I even placed it. This prevented me from placing a bid on another auction for the same thing.
My name is Elizabeth L. Driscoll/Go Daddy PR VP. I am posting this comment on behalf of Go Daddy General Counsel, Christine Jones. "Go Daddy has reviewed the auction and found nothing improper. Adam Dicker's knowledge on the auction was no different from what any customer coming to our TDNAM site would have had. To ensure customer confidence and to avoid any possible future questions of impropriety all GD employees are now and in the future prohibited from participating in TDNAM auctions, purchasing, sales & back orders." - Christine Jones, Go Daddy General Counsel & Corporate Secretary
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.
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.
I always skip hidden reserve price auctions. I just move on to one that has a minimum bid stated, or no minimum/reserve at all. For me a reserve price is a complete waste of time. So the seller loses the bids of anyone like me.
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.
Summary: "We didn't do anything wrong, but we're going to stop doing it."
Quit being a weasel. Take a stand. Make a choice and stick with it.
Either say that it was ok and you are going to continue to allow your employees to do it, or say that it is not ok and that Mr. Dicker did something wrong.
Reserves are the main reason I quit even bothering with e-bay. I got tired of bidding on something, and then 3 days later, finding out that the person selling the item had dismissed my bid before I even placed it.
I'm not a big fan of Reserves either but you'd have to be EXTREMELY SLOW (in more than one way) to not be able to determine whether or not your bid is valid for three days. As a matter of fact, a person who can read should know instantly if their bid met the reserve. All reserve auctions say "Reserve not yet met" until the reserve price is met. E-bay also tells you in the bid confirmation page if your bid is higher than the reserves or not.
The people using reserves can tell themselves how they are not lying about what the real minimum bid is...
They aren't lying. There is a difference between lying (intentionally giving false information) and choosing not to disclose information. Every auction I have seen states that there are reserves, but that they will not be disclosed until the end. That is in no way lying, it is up front telling them they choose not to disclose the information. The potential bidders can then choose what to do in that situation.
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.)
Lose.
One "o".
It means to fail.
As in 'You lose at spelling'.
It's lose.
This signature is lame.
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
You are right. I must have gotten confused with some other auction site I was using at the time. It has been a while. I humbly withdraw the part about not knowing that the reserve wasn't met for 3 days concerning e-bay. Although having a reserve that is lying about what the true minimum valid bid is.
It is lying. In when you tell someone what the "Minimum Bid" is, people understand you to mean "Minimum VALID Bid". It isn't the fact that they have a reserve that they are lying about. It is what the true minimum bid is that they are lying about. If "Minimum Bid" does not mean "Minimum Valid Bid" then it means nothing at all.
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]
In when you tell someone what the "Minimum Bid" is, people understand you to mean "Minimum VALID Bid".
Nowhere was it stated or implied that "Minimum Bid" means the lowest valid bid. If that's what you inferred, you misinterpreted. Misinterpretation on the receiving end does not constitute intentional distribution of false information.
That is just a dumb thing to say. If your wife says "I didn't sleep with your best friend.", it is inferred that she didn't have sex with him. If she's been screwing him for the last six months, she is still lying to you, even if she never actually fell asleep.
Obviously the point of "Minimum Bid" is to say that it is the lowest valid bid. Otherwise, it would be pointless to even have a minimum bid, as $0 would always be the minimum bid if you include invalid bids. (If your not going to count negative values.) So, if they are not trying to tell you that it is the minimum VALID bid, then they are lying about what the minimum INVALID bid is. Just because you have gotten used to being lied to regularly, and can recognize such lies, doesn't mean that it isn't a lie.
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.