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As I discussed here, GoDaddy has now increased the commission rate for sales not using their landing pages at Afternic and at DAN and Uniregistry. One by one GoDaddy has acquired all three of these formerly independent marketplaces, and now, will make the commission rate 25% at all three for sales not using in-house landing pages.
While there remain alternatives, including selling domains directly through our own landing pages, do these or further attempts to buy out the available domain marketplaces constitute a creation of an effective monopoly?
Antitrust laws are regulations that encourage competition by limiting the market power of any particular firm. This often involves ensuring that mergers and acquisitions don't overly concentrate market power or form monopolies, as well as breaking up firms that have become monopolies.
This represents an at least 5% increase at Afternic for me, since I use my own landing pages, and keep in mind that for larger sales, even more of an increase, since at Afternic , you used to pay 20% of the first $5,000, 15% of the amount over $5k up to $25,000, and 10% over that.
Uniregistry used to charge 15%, for brokered sales, so this represents a 10% increase there.
DAN used to charge 9% for sales that resulted from listings within their marketplace, which represents a 16% increase there.
I'm starting to wonder whether some sort of anti-trust action might be viable against GoDaddy as it tries to take over the domain marketplace, and impose its high commission structure across the board. I don't think anyone has given any serious thought to that sort of thing yet, but I don't see the difference between buying up all the domain marketplaces, versus buying up too many casinos in one place, or too many gas stations across the country, especially since these GoDaddy actions of imposing the same (and now higher) commission across the board at too many outlets become anti-competitive. At what point will GoDaddy hold an effective monopoly in the domain sales business?
While there remain alternatives, including selling domains directly through our own landing pages, do these or further attempts to buy out the available domain marketplaces constitute a creation of an effective monopoly?
Antitrust laws are regulations that encourage competition by limiting the market power of any particular firm. This often involves ensuring that mergers and acquisitions don't overly concentrate market power or form monopolies, as well as breaking up firms that have become monopolies.
This represents an at least 5% increase at Afternic for me, since I use my own landing pages, and keep in mind that for larger sales, even more of an increase, since at Afternic , you used to pay 20% of the first $5,000, 15% of the amount over $5k up to $25,000, and 10% over that.
Uniregistry used to charge 15%, for brokered sales, so this represents a 10% increase there.
DAN used to charge 9% for sales that resulted from listings within their marketplace, which represents a 16% increase there.
I'm starting to wonder whether some sort of anti-trust action might be viable against GoDaddy as it tries to take over the domain marketplace, and impose its high commission structure across the board. I don't think anyone has given any serious thought to that sort of thing yet, but I don't see the difference between buying up all the domain marketplaces, versus buying up too many casinos in one place, or too many gas stations across the country, especially since these GoDaddy actions of imposing the same (and now higher) commission across the board at too many outlets become anti-competitive. At what point will GoDaddy hold an effective monopoly in the domain sales business?
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