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GoDaddy gave a domain to a stranger without any documentation

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Re: GoDaddy gave a domain to a stranger without any documentation

#201

Post by erlkonig »

GoDaddy proved themselves corrupt forever ago, grabbing domains their customers didn't pay for in time and then auctioning them back to those customers for massive markups. There's a litany of terrible things they've done.

My main domain is still with nic.ddn.mil / rs.internic.net … i.e the travesty of itself today, networksolutions, which once had the ethics to only give one domain name to each physical site so as to make sure future generations could have them. That fled the moment some pharm company attempted to buy about 90 domains at one and the greed set in. But the same process they failed to improved for a decade or two after getting an income stream is still considered more reliable that GoDaddy.

GoDaddy is corrupt, the joke everyone already knew who was in the know.

Re: GoDaddy gave a domain to a stranger without any documentation

#202

Post by Silhouette »

vetrom wrote: post #171
Silhouette wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whatever was really happening in that incident it seems clear that it was not a simple matter of having registered some domains with Cloudflare and then getting a shakedown for $100k+ because of that. If anyone else chooses to read the post then I suggest skimming the comments (that are mostly hidden by default) as well.

The point isnt the apologists that pop up whereever CF gets mentioned, the point is that they more or less have a built reputation for deceptive loss leader marketing. Maybe early/MVP product engineers should know better, but CFs own education materials do not teach you to expect that.

I have no financial or professional connection to Cloudflare as far as I know and that's partly because I'm not sure I like the way they operate and the level of control over everyone's access to the Web they now have. But if we're going to criticise then I think it should be on a reasonable and preferably objective basis. The claim I challenged appears to be the complete opposite of that unfortunately.

Re: GoDaddy gave a domain to a stranger without any documentation

#203

Post by mh- »

Beijinger wrote: post #172
Animats wrote: post #116

Register your domain as a trademark. It costs a few hundred dollars, and can be done online. This gives you stronger rights with ICANN, against anybody who illicitly acquired the domain, against typosquatters, the registrar, and the courts. You can send intimidating lawyer letters, and quickly escalate from the registrar's support department to lawyer-to-lawyer phone calls. ANIMATS®

Trademarks mean Bullshit. Facebook closed a site of mine besides having a registered and valid (US) trademark that precedes everything.

Trademarks can't magically prevent someone from doing something wrong. That doesn't make them useless.

(No idea how this relates to Facebook, so responding to your comment generically.)

Re: GoDaddy gave a domain to a stranger without any documentation

#204

Post by mh- »

nabbed wrote: post #74
8cvor6j844qw_d6 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> more likely to have established processes that work for all sorts of cases Whatever their process is, it's concerning. I wonder how many sign-offs are actually involved, or if it's just a ticket handled and closed by a rep. Either way, GoDaddy is not the first choice for a new domain in 2026.

>Either way, GoDaddy is not the first choice for a new domain in 2026. Off the top of your head, what would be a decent one?

Top tier is still MarkMonitor. Last I spoke with them, they had a five-figure minimum spend, but the per-domain costs are competitive. That cost buys you proper named support contacts, etc.

If you look up the whois for microsoft.com or yahoo.com, that's who you'll find.

Re: GoDaddy gave a domain to a stranger without any documentation

#205

Post by SahAssar »

walrus01 wrote: post #120
Doohickey-d wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They specialize in domains management for businesses who consider their domain to be _very_ important. Think Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Wikipedia... (all of those are listed as clients on the wiki page) As in "pay a lot of money", and we'll dedicate someone to your domain who makes sure that "giving a domain to a stranger without any documents" will _never_ happen.

a number of the largest companies that used to be 'clients' of markmonitor have now basically become their own domain registrars and have a direct relationship with ICANN. Amazon for instance. It's curious that google was one and has offloaded it to squarespace.

I'm pretty sure google never used them for their own domains, and the whole markmonitor/squarespace thing was their "google domains" product where they sold registrar services to others. Besides that they also are a registry for .app/.dev and others, but don't sell them via their own registrar anymore.

Re: GoDaddy gave a domain to a stranger without any documentation

#207

Post by mh- »

0_-_0 wrote: post #101
rrr_oh_man wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's good about MarkMonitor? All I see is Gartner-friendly buzzwords and AI generated "business people".

I want to know this, too. My enterprise clients tend to like using it but that certainly doesn't mean anything.

See other sibling comments to yours, but you basically have named support contacts who would have been the human-in-the-loop ensuring that a situation like OP's can't happen.

I haven't spoken to them in like a decade, but they also offered other monitoring stuff like notifying you of likely phishing registrations, etc. And it's no longer novel now with options like Route53, but they used to be one of the only solutions with proper RBAC/delegation/audit logs.

Re: GoDaddy gave a domain to a stranger without any documentation

#208

Post by SahAssar »

dawnerd wrote: post #50
thot_experiment wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Literally anywhere else, GoDaddy is utter trash and has been for many years. Namecheap is the one I use personally.

Namecheap has had its own host of issues like a few years back breaking hsts and causing tons of sites to break for quite a while and their response was basically oh well. That incident along made me move my domains off to porkbun.

Porkbun uses cloudflare as their DNS backend, and has accidentally issued certs for domains hosted on them (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40455508 was one instance).

Since cloudflare is basically the only registrar that will not allow you to host nameservers anywhere else I'd be weary to use them (even indirectly).

Re: GoDaddy gave a domain to a stranger without any documentation

#209

Post by mh- »

r_lee wrote: post #206

any serious business should bite the bullet and use markmonitor or something similar where you get a named support guy

Agreed, and if you don't want to pay for MarkMonitor, at least use your enterprise AWS account, where you have paid support.

Re: GoDaddy gave a domain to a stranger without any documentation

#210

Post by dpark »

libraryatnight wrote: post #198
dpark wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like name.com was squatting on your expired domain and extorted $140 from you to get it back.

Often there's a redemption period (depending on tld i think) where the domain can be recovered. Registrars will generally charge a redemption fee during this period.

Some fee for this is reasonable. $140 seems something less than reasonable for most TLDs.

I would think this fee should be, at most, the cost of 1 year of registration.

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