Domain Frontrunning A Ghost In The Machine (Part 4)
This article is written by Jason Lee Miller who is a WebProNews editor and writer covering business and technology. He talks about domain in this article.
He also disagreed with the notion that there was no originality in domain searches. “So we did a study of all the names that were reserved and then purchased during that four-day period, and over 90% of the searched names were purchased by the same customer.”
Jay Daley, CTO of Nominet, remained skeptical and didn’t hide it. “But if you don’t share the data, nobody’s going to believe you. I mean, if you have that data there of provable front-running, if you have a video, CCTV, a man sitting there, that man is front-running, great. We need to see it. Because we have done extensive searches through our registry, through every single complaint, and there is not a single case of front-running we can prove.
“My view on it is that the world is just much smaller than people believe that the world is and that the same stimuli affect all of us, and there are so many people looking for good names, there’s just too many coincidences.”
At this point it’s like listening to a person who believes in ghosts argue with a person who doesn’t. Nevett didn’t let up, either, asking Daley to explain how customers would be approached after searching for a domain and offered the domain at an inflated price.
Daley, a good scientist, asked for Nevitt to give him the information necessary for him to find out, which, obviously, wasn’t going to happen.
What everybody did seem to agree on without evidence: If frontrunning is going on, information necessary for it to happen is somehow leaking from registrars or ISPs.
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