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.ai registry advises buyers not to use GoDaddy

Kevin Murphy, March 19, 2024, 14:34:33 (UTC), Domain Registries

The manager of the increasingly popular .ai ccTLD has seemingly escalated his beef with GoDaddy, now advising registrants to not transfer their .ai domains to the market-leading registrar due to technical and operational issues.

The list of approved registrars on the .ai registry web site has contained a warning about problems transferring domains into GoDaddy for many months, but now it explicitly advises against such transfers. The site reads:

We have had several problems with transfers into GoDaddy. First, you have to use auth codes of 32 characters or less. Second they can take weeks and many email and phone calls to actually do the transfer. Anyplace else the transfer is nearly instant once the receiving party does the transfer with the auth code and the domain is unlocked. With GoDaddy the auth code is just the start of a long process. For years GoDaddy could not transer .ai domains at all. We do not advise transfering to go GoDaddy and if you do don’t ask us for help, the problem is all GoDaddy.

GoDaddy has also been removed from .ai’s list of supported registrars, but registry manager Vince Cate tells me he did this at the request of GoDaddy, which he said is a reseller of Team Internet’s 1API. He declined to comment further.

I asked GoDaddy for comment a few weeks ago but did not receive one.

An earlier version of Cate’s warning, from about a year ago as .ai domains started to fly off the shelf, read:

The company Godaddy will say “domains with this extension are not transferable” when someone tries to transfer a “.ai” domain to them when a more correct error message would be “Godaddy does not know how to transfer .ai domains even though it is done using the industry standard EPP transfer command”.

It was later updated to read:

The company Godaddy will say “domains with this extension are not transferable” when someone tries to transfer a “.ai” domain to them when a more correct error message would be “Godaddy does not know how to transfer .ai domains even though it is done using the industry standard EPP transfer command”. They will also say, “Technically .ai domains are not transferable between most registrars, but we have a dedicated team that transfers them manually.” This is so wrong. All other registrars have no trouble doing them automatically. The only technical failure is at Godaddy. Because of they way Godaddy is doing this, I get many people asking me, “Vince, why don’t you let people transfer .ai domains?”, as if I was doing something wrong and not Godaddy. I do let people transfer .ai domains. All of the above registrars can do it automatically without any trouble. Really.

While the .ai domain is managed by the Government of Anguilla, Cate seems to have substantial autonomy over the registry. Much of its bare-bones web site is written in the first person.

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