Insider bidding at Godaddy’s auctions

I have always had a doubt about various domain auction houses and their policies on domain auctions in general. If you think about it, these companies can do whatever they want. There is no control body in place to monitor their dealings. They can keep the expired domains they like, auction off the rest and noone will be the wiser.

It’s nothing new either. Suspicions were recently raised about insider bidding in the dot Asia sunrise auctions.

A few days ago we had a new revelation. Folks at NamePros.com ( domaining forum ) discovered that Adam Dicker (VP of TDNAM ) has been bidding and winning domains at TDNAM ( Godaddy’s domain name aftermarket ).

The story was quickly picked up by and featured on different sites and forums and has even been Slashdotted.

For those that doubt that Mr Dicker is a VP of TDNAM, here is proof from the man himself.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against Adam Dicker. He runs DNForum quite well and seems to be an ok guy in general. My worry here is, if someone as high up the hierarchy at Godaddy bid on a domain name via TDNAM without any concerns of how it might look in the public’s eye, what are the rest of Godaddy’s employees doing? Are our bids, watchlists and everything else being monitored for any good domains we might find? What are Pool, NameJet and the rest of the aftermarkets doing?

Is it even worth bidding on names any more, or are we only entitled to pay exorbitant fees for the trashy domains noone at the above mentioned companies considered to be worth any money?

This entry was posted on Monday, June 30th, 2008 at 11:48 am and is filed under Domain News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.