Expiring Names - NameJet

GMH.com is on Namejet with 1 day to go. Bidding is already at $12,000 and certain to go higher with almost 200 bidders in the mix.

As three key letters, GMH is very strong and worth its valuation in the open market. But this post is not about price, its about poor domain management.

GMH has been the property of Hughes Electronics Corporation since 1997. Archive.org shows the domain has been forward to Hughes.com since 2000, a fairly typical waste of a domain by a corporation. Nameservers are set to HAC.com, another Hughes property, and domain administration emails are set to tom@gmh and ebm3@gmh. Clearly these have been overlooked for some time. Only two domains appear with these antiquated entries - GMH.com and C79.net. Obviously someone did not document what these email addresses were for and how they were forwarded. Using some HAC.com forwarding servers, it appears that other domains hosted on these servers also no longer resolve.

While it is possible Network Solutions might take pity on an entity like Hughes to avoid litigation, if this error is not caught in the next two months it is unlikely to ever be resolved without multi-party lawsuits in which each entity asserts its right to the expired name.

This will still continue to underscore the lack of use of domains at large corporations. Forwarding, poor management and lack of monitors will continue to plague failed companies until they learn that if they don't hire someone to clean up their act for them, the domain name system will do it for them in due time.

Ed Muller is a registrant specialist and provides consulting and litigation expertise in both Domains and DNS.

Post-Auction Update
GMH.com was won for a top bid of $13,600 on September 8th 2009