GoDaddy Moves To Close Shady Standard Tactics Subsidiary

Earlier this month, we reported on The Go Daddy Group doing everything it could to keep the public from knowing about its subsidiary Standard Tactics, which it used for domain warehousing. Although the practice wasn’t necessarily against the Terms & Conditions of ICANN, they sure went through a lot of trouble to make sure Standard Tactics couldn’t easily be identified as a GoDaddy company.

Andrew over at DomainNameWire was the first to take the story public, and we followed suit quickly, concluding our article with the words: “It’s really no wonder GoDaddy is trying to cover its tracks and hide these practices, but thanks to Andrew the word is now out.”

Yesterday evening, Andrew got on the company show GoDaddyRadio together with CEO Bob Parsons. In the middle of their conversation, Parsons informs the listeners that the company is effectively shutting down Standard Tactics. All of the names the subsidiary owned are being added to GoDaddy’s auction service The Domain Name AfterMarket with a $10 starting bid. Parsons then goes on to claim that it was founded for ‘research on monetization practices’ in the first place and denied that it had anything to do with domain warehousing.

I don’t buy that for a second, but it’s good to see the company decided to listen to its critics, was open to a discussion, and didn’t hesitate too long to make the right decision. There’s no question that the bad publicity surrounding the company about the shady subsidiary effectively spurred the decision to close Standard Tactics.