Its Own Service When Switching Nameservers — GoDaddy Promotes

Domain registrar offers its own competing service when changing nameservers.

Domain name registrar GoDaddy.com is promoting its own domain parking service “Cash Parking” to clients who attempt to change a domain’s nameservers to a competing domain parking firm.

If you have a domain name on GoDaddy’s name servers (which is the case whenever you register a fresh domain name or use forwarding) and try to switch to the nameservers of a domain parking firm, you receive an alert with a special domain parking offer:

The system is set up to only offer the parking special if you switch your nameservers to a parking service. In my tests the offer was presented when switching to ns1.parked.com (Parked.com’s nameservers) but not when changing the nameservers to my web hosting firm.

I understand trying to cross-sell your own products to clients, but to me the domain name control panel is sacred ground and shouldn’t be used to push products, especially in such a targeted manner. What’s next? If I change my nameservers to a popular web hosting firm will GoDaddy interrupt the process by offering its own web hosting services? With GoDaddy grabbing 45% of fresh domain name registrations, at some point these behaviors will be frowned upon as anti-competitive. If this were Google or Microsoft, a competitor’s lawyers would by now be on the phone.

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