alexjawad

Gee, who would've guessed this would turn into a philosophical discussion.

"People have to realise that an idea is worth nothing. A good idea with great execution has value, but without this execution, it’s worthless. Getting an estimate for execution of an idea in 2009 does not grant you ownership of it."

Bang on target!!

Yeah, you may have a point there. I for sure won't repeat that mistake again. Having my .com domains snapped away from under my nose is definitely the most annoying part of branding.

I just bought a domain through said service and today received an email asking me to scan a copy of my passport or similar, or they may cancel the order. Is this common practice?

It took me a couple of weeks before mine disappeared, and during that time I had run searches to double check the availability. The domain name was totally random so it feels extremely far-fetched that someone happened to register it just before I was about to purchase it.

This recently happened me and I posted a thread about it here on HN. Godaddy responded to an angry tweet of mine, saying that they don't pursue this practice and asked if the domain was listed with their "privacy service". When they didn't respond to my reply to that, I emailed them. Customer relations replied that the domain is protected by their "privacy service" and they can't reveal who bought it, speculating it was an "individual".

Same goes for www.whois.sc that links to www.cheap-registrar.com - a reseller of GoDaddy domains.

Nice article. How are you doing today with users and feedback?

Thanks for the link!

Since a huge chunk of the identity of businesses is their homepage, coming up with a great name (or several, so you can test them) that also has an available .com-address is probably the biggest headache in branding in my opinion.

Shouldn't this be controlled better? Shouldn't it even be illegal?

That's good advice. Thanks very much!

In that case, it's outrageous! What provider should one use to securely search for available domain names?