Auction Platforms Shouldn’t Benefit from Default Bidders

If the winning bidder for a domain name auction does not pay and the auction platform offers the domain name to the next highest bidder(s), the default bidder’s bids should be removed entirely. The platform should treat the auction as if the default bidder never existed. Otherwise, the platform would benefit from a default bidder at the expense of other participants. This is unfair.

Rick Schwartz has been railing against Dynadot’s auction policy for the last couple of days, and I think he has valid points. Nobody can speak for Rick better than Rick himself, so I shared the post he just wrote on LinkedIn and a post from yesterday. If you haven’t experienced this issue with before, you can read his posts to learn what happened and understand why he is upset.

Here’s Rick’s LinkedIn post from yesterday with an email he wrote to Dynadot Founder and CEO Todd Han:

Here’s the original post Rick shared on LinkedIn:

Hopefully, Dynadot changes its auction policy.

Additional thoughts:

I just saw that Richard Kirkendall of Namecheap brought up a valid point regarding default bidders:

Nope, auctions were gamed by a bidder that would open two accounts, bid up auctions to scare away other bidders and would also remain the second bidder so that they could get domains at a much lower price. Our solution is the only solution that works.

— Richard Kirkendall (@NamecheapCEO) November 6, 2025

In lieu of allowing an underbidder to pay for an auction with/without the default bidder’s bids, simply rerunning an auction from scratch could be an option as well. I believe this is what Namecheap and DropCatch do.