Thanks to Slashdot for pointing me to the story of the GoDaddy executive bidding against their own customers in their auctions.
The story began with an alert user in a discussion on namepros.com. The user had noticed that the winner in an auction of an expiring domain was one Adam Dicker, “VP of Domain Name Aftermarket (TDNAM)” at GoDaddy. Like many registrars, GoDaddy holds domain auctions, including those of expiring domains.
Domain Name Wire looked into the story further and discovered, unsurprisingly, that GoDaddy has no policy against this sort of thing. The potential is there, of course, for employees to bid up auctions simply to get the prices higher for the company’s benefit. As the reader on Namepros put it:
These employees may or may not have access to more information than the rest of us, and they may or may not have to pay full price for the domains they win. This is particularly insidious at GoDaddy since they are one of very few auction sites which don’t show you who you are bidding against. So I have no idea if any of the names I won that day were inflated in price due to TDNam executives bidding against me.
GoDaddy did tell them that they have controls in place to prevent someone from gaming the system, but it’s not clear if the sort of manipulation discussed in the quote above meets their definition of manipulation.
Domain Name Wire dug further and found out that such non-policies are common. They go on to wonder if it’s hard for such companies to hire talented people if they will then be shut out of the markets right in the middle of a bubble. A further post includes more follow-up from Sedo and Enom.
Something about it all definitely stinks, but the whole aftermarket for domains is skating on the edge of shady anyway. Perhaps it’s not surprising to find players trying to get every edge they can.
[Update: GoDaddy has issued a statement saying that Dicker's actions were not improper, but that from now on employees are prohibited from participating in such transactions.]
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