Boing Boing on Kiting: Year Late, Dollar Short

Boing Boing is usually a great read, but this week's item on domain name kiting and the add-grace period (AGP) wasn't its best work. The practice - which Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow called a "new online scam" - has been widely discussed for more than a year (see July 2005 post at Netcraft, among others that mention the practice), and has since been written about by the Internet Stock Blog and Joi Ito (a prominent friend of Boing Boing), among many others.

But no one has been more visible on this issue than Go Daddy CEO Bob Parsons, who was the first person to use the term "domain name kiting" on his Hot Points blog on May 10. Parsons then took his case to the pages of Business Week.

Maybe Cory Doctorow wasn't aware of the lineage of the term when he linked to DomainNameKiting.com. A whois search shows that the domain name is registered at Go Daddy and "owned" by Domains By Proxy, a privacy service run by Go Daddy. Is the domain name really owned by a third party that just happened to use all Go Daddy's services to register and cloak the ownership info on the name? The related forum, DomainKitingSucks.com is also owned by - you guessed it - Domains by Proxy.

We respect Bob Parson's views on domain "kiting" (many in the industry use "domain tasting" instead) and he has certainly been public about his objections to the practice. But it's not a new story, and there are plenty of reasonable sources with standing on this issue who are willing to be public with their opinions about the add-drop-grace period and how it is being used.

BoingBoing's popularity means that it sends tons of traffic to the stories and sites it features. Linking to an anonymous site with Go Daddy information on every line of its privatized whois record raises several possibilities - that it's either a "cloaked" Go Daddy site or a Made-for-AdSense site that co-opted Parsons' anti-kiting advocacy to turn a quick buck. Linking directly to posts on the blogs of Parsons or Ito would have been a better choice.

  Posted by RichM July 24, 2006 | Permalink | Newsletter

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Boing Boing on Kiting: Year Late, Dollar Short - Jul 24, 2006





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