As I shared a couple of week ago, Right of the Dot (ROTD) is hosting a live domain name auction with well-known auctioneer Wayne Wheat at the helm. The live portion of the auction will be held on February 25, 2021 at 12:00 PM CST. Bidding will be hosted on the HiBid auction platform.
According to a LinkedIn post by ROTD founder Monte Cahn, the domain names in the auction are now listed on the HiBid platform, and bidding has opened:
Right of the Dot, the domain name industry company founded by Monte Cahn, announced it will be running a live, independently-operated domain name auction at the end of February. This auction is unrelated to the NamesCon auction that is being hosted by GoDaddy later on this month. Monte and his company have managed domain industry auctions for more than 15 years.
A press release with details about the auction was published this afternoon. Here is a brief excerpt with the most important details about the auction:
I spend quite a bit of time on NameJet searching for upcoming domain name auctions and participating in auctions. Overall, I have a pretty decent experience using the platform, save for the occasional delayed delivery or non-delivery of domain names. There was also the time NameJet was auctioning a domain name I owned without my permission, but that was apparently an issue of human error.
Yesterday evening, I noticed that Shawnee.com is listed as an upcoming “Expiry” auction on NameJet. When I did a bit of pre-auction research, it seemed peculiar that this domain name would be listed for an upcoming auction, and I posted about it on Twitter:
In August of 2011, General Electric announced the acquisition of a company called PAA Laboratories. “GE Healthcare today announced it has reached an agreement to acquire PAA Laboratories, a developer and supplier of cell culture media for biomedical research and the fast-growing biopharmaceutical and vaccine manufacturing industry,” stated the news release on the GE Healthcare website. I don’t really know anything about PAA Laboratories, but the company owned the valuable PAA.com domain name.
GoDaddy will be hosting the annual Namescon live domain name auction in January during the NamesCon Online event. People who are interested in having their domain names listed in the live and silent auctions may now submit their domain names to GoDaddy for review, according to a tweet from GoDaddy’s Paul Nicks:
Submit your names today for the upcoming NamesCon Online Auction! Easy submission form here: https://t.co/dWx5qxvjMQ
— Paul Nicks (@PaulENicks) December 1, 2020
Tracking the provenance of a domain name has gotten much more difficult in the last several years. GDPR and registrar changes (like GoDaddy removing public facing Whois records) make it impossible to match an email address to a Whois record, particularly when a broker or seller approaches a buyer offering to sell a domain name. For instance, if I buy a GoDaddy-registered domain name from someone who acquired it in 2018, it would not be possible to see the email address of the registrant now or in 2018.
An unclear provenance on a domain name adds more risk to domain name acquisitions.
