An In Depth Look at Google`s Potential Buyout of GoDaddy - The Deal
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Bloggers are a lot like detectives, they pick up several bits of information left behind by the perpetrator and try to piece them together and form a theory. This theory will be used on the suspect(s) and they in turn will be examined in terms of the evidence to decide whether or not they are guilty. In this specific case, the suspect is Google. The theory: they are planning to acquire GoDaddy via buyout. Now it is up to them to either confess or be subjected to the judgments of a jury of their peers -- that's you. Look, here comes the lawyer with the first piece of evidence.
Over three years ago, Google successfully made their bid to become an authorized registrar, placing them in direct competition with GoDaddy. It begins! For those of you unfamiliar with what this means, a registrar is a company with the authority to register Internet domain names. Most are accredited by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which have control over Generic Top Level Domains (gTLDs), like .com, .org, and .net. Since the turn of the century, hundreds of registrars have entered the domain name registration market, with GoDaddy leading the pack. Google shrugged off the allegations of confrontation with the registrar veterans and said they were only trying to better understand what their offering potential was for their Google Apps endeavor.
What they came to understand was that cooperation is much more productive than confrontation, not to mention more civil. They ended up teaming up with the top two registrars, GoDaddy and Enom, to sell domain names for a $10 per year subscription in a Google Apps for Your Domain package. Turn on your speculators. According to eweek.com, GoDaddy has also recently been filing for several related patents, like search, VoIP, email, and domain technologies, that would further interest Google in the company.
Andrew Allemann, editor of the Domain Name Wire blog, says, "Google would get its hands on reams of data about the very domain names it is indexing, as well as acquire its patent portfolio." In addition, Allemann says GoDaddy "likely" uses Google for an advertising feed when it parks its customers' pages. Parking simply means that GoDaddy and Internet advertisers will use an underdeveloped domain name and resolve it to a page with advertising geared toward its visitors. "[Google] could lock down that advertising base there, and keep GoDaddy from switching to Yahoo or something like that," he says. So far, this sounds like a no-brainer for Google.
As of right now (when this article was written) the Google/GoDaddy partnership remains mostly focused on Google Apps for Your Domain. Aside from figuring out a way to consolidate their email application offer with Google's Gmail, GoDaddy is offering other useful tools, such as website formation tools, chat applications, and e-commerce tools. It hasn't even been a year since these two teamed up, and things seem to be going quite nicely. But there are other things, like domain expiration information controlled by the registrars, that tie in to Google's desire to keep up with and/or surpass Microsoft in the applications market. Of course, Google will probably spout the typical cliché about cleaning up their search engine product for a better user experience.
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