GoDaddy...Pre Reg'd 256 .eu domains along with an associate in the Uk.. GoDaddy's domain search engine said they were available.
Found the .eu database about 3 weeks before sunrise phase ended. Nearly 200 (176 seems to ring a bell with this issue) were already awarded, some as early as December 2005.
Called GoDaddy to let them know what I had found. They told me I was crazy because such a thing did not exist. Talked to 4 different people about this all the way up the food chain.
Finally someone actually got the bright idea and went to the site that I had been telling them about. My, what such silence. It was almost deafening.
I asked them what in the hell was their search tied into because it certainly was not tied in to any .eu database. I was told it searched their own database...as if they were the only ones in the whole wide world registering friggin .eu domain names!
End result? Only 6 domains pre-reg'd went through. Took months and months and months for them to refund reg fees. Numerous phone calls wasting time and money not to mention have money tied up in the domain names.
And then that pompous ass Bob Parsons cried foul and talked about all the front companies set up in the US to perpetrate what ammounted to cyber fraud and reg'd like 350,000 domains.
I emailed Bob during one of his chats. Needless to say, my email was never addressed by him the whole time he was blasting how this was handled by the EU regulating body.
GoDaddy dropped the ball bigtime on this .eu thing and they had no clue what the hell was going on with the .eu database. But Bob put the blame purely on everyone else except his own inept system and clueless staff.
What was the question again? Oh yeah...I vote for GD.
