GoDaddy.com today abruptly changed their corporate policy and banned all company employees from participating in online domain auctions operated by GoDaddy's TDNAM.com 

division and also prohibited employees from taking part in company purchasing, sales & back orders. The move came in response to complaints from TDNAM bidders about GoDaddy VP Adam Dicker winning auctions they were involved in (the company allowed employee bidding at the time). The protests started in a thread about DN 

Journal's weekly domain sales column at the NamePros.com forum and quickly spread to domain news outlets and blogs like DomainNameWire.com and TheDomains.com, then spilled over to broader Internet news outlets like Slashdot.com.

We think it was wise for GoDaddy to act promptly and decisively on this issue and they made the right call. It will be interesting now to see how another registrar, Tucows.com, resolves (or does not resolve) another highly publicized imbroglio with one of their customers who has accused them of unethical behavior.  TheDomains.com author and attorney Michael Berkens won 23 domains in Tucows auctions, only to have them taken back by the company when they claimed that had put them up for sale accidentally (that issue is the hot topic in the same thread we linked to in the paragraph above leading to TheDomains.com). Berkens was not the Lone Ranger. All told, 25 winning bidders had a total of 260 domains taken from them.
(Posted June 30, 2008)