The extortion that goes on in the domain parking/buying/auctioning business is pretty ridiculous. Domain parking is something nobody really likes but is difficult to figure out fair ways of preventing. Today, Go Daddy began offering up much awaited .me domains, and the domain parkers got on their horses and started firing away.

But a funny thing happened on Go Daddy: the servers seized up and weren’t able to reject domain requests that were already taken earlier in the day. Thus the domains were sold to several people at once, and of course, all of them had their credit cards or PayPal accounts charged.

Not a shock considering Go Daddy’s dubious customer experience record. But it is kind of funny to see domain parkers getting their credit cards put on hold and not getting any of the domains they requested. Always good for a hearty laugh. In fact, reading some of the horror stories today from failed domain parkers has been quite a bit of fun.

The .me domain came about from a deal with the government of Montenegro. Hopefully, they got a rich off the deal. Interesting seeing Balkan nations get on the domain parking bandwagon. Maybe Andorra with their .ad domain will be next in on the act.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 17th, 2008 at 3:04 pmand is filed under Search Engine Marketing. 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.