Hacker News Reader

Comment by aviv | Hacker News Reader

I know for a fact Godaddy used to do this, I don't know if they still do (but would assume so). If you searched for domains and/or added them to the cart but did not purchase right away, they had their little known team of reviewers that constantly checked the list of all domains people were interested in purchasing. The ones that were deemed valuable were registered by an affiliated entity and offered in their auctions. My source for this information is a person who used to work there.

View on HN

This sounds totally unethical to me. Is someone regulating this? Have they ever been fined for such underhand tactics?

I think there are some ICANN policy preventing/limiting this. However, that generally only applies to gTLDs. The domain in question .mx is a country code domain. So ICANN does not have the same level of say on certain things.

-edit- Also registrars and registries have probably spend more time interacting with ICANN, and probably push for policies that are advantageous to them.

Wow, why is this not made a bigger deal of? I mean this is outright market manipulation, is it not?

Countries, can construct their own policies for their domains. Sometimes they omit things or allow things that other registries prohibit. They also may require things like being a resident ect...

However, quickly looking at some ICANN's policies take look at number 3. Wheather any of this applies to .mx depends on how the policies for that ccTLD are setup.

https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/approved-with-specs-20...

Also if you are thinking of filing a complaint keep in mind ICANN is quite bureaucratic so nothing may happen or take ages.

-edit- if the domain in question is important I suggest talking to someone well versed in the minutia of all this.

So domain front running is a thing (I actually coined the term yesterday without knowing it was already a thing!): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_name_front_running

According to the article, it seems it's not very well regulated.

Although, I will add; it's new to me. Godaddy has been known to front run domains. This would be the first time I have heard of it from namecheap.

I've seen this happen a couple of times with Namecheap in the last 3 months. The last case was literally yesterday (as I explained in the original post)

Must be a pretty recent thing if so that's kinda sad. I would say one of the biggest problems is ICANN, and from my understanding was it was supposed to eventually move to where those in charge were openly voted on, but that has never happened. Sadly, ICANN is the defacto DNS root and some their decisions are annoying.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com