auDA Complaint: Superannuation.com.au

I am making this complaint to auDA today against all of the Registrars Trillion (formally Trellian) owns including; Above.com, Help Web Hosting, Fabulous.com.au, DNTrade.com.au, DomainShield.com.au, Drop.com.au, Netfleet.com.au(.)

As posted yesterday, my company Assets Australia Pty Ltd won the domain name “Superannuation.com.au” for $325,000 on Drop.com.au. Drop is Australia’s one-and-only public expired domain auction platform.

Drop.com.au are a private company owned by Trillion who have a monopoly over catching domain names. They use all of the Registrars mentioned above to ensure they have a monopoly over catching Australian domain names every day. Uncontested. They have NO competition.

My company won the domain, fair and square, according to their terms. And I didn’t break any of their terms. Drop accepted my initial payment for auction access the day before and allowed my company to bid multiple times over multiple hours.

Not long after I won the domain, and the auction officially closed, Anthony Peake (the guy who runs Drop – effectively a director) rang my phone and the following transpired. (During the phone conversation and directly after, I made contemporaneous notes about what was said. I am willing to sign a statutory declaration in regards to the below, and will do if required.)

• He was surprised I had bid so much money for the domain, and asked if it was legitimate. To be honest, I think it was the most amount of money, ever, on record, to be bid for a dropping domain in Australia. I told him my bid was real.
• He said he “wasn’t sure if I was banned or not” and that it would depend if I was planning on writing more articles exposing some of their domain name acquisition techniques, if I was going to continue to expose domain name prices, and if I was going to continue calling them a “monopoly”.
• I told him that Drop.com.au IS a monopoly, as they purchased their only competition a few years ago (Trellion (Drop) purchased Netfleet in November 2020), and they are the only Registrar in the world who has multiple Australian domain name Registry access and offers a public drop auction through multiple Registry connections. In simple terms, that means, Drop.com.au HAVE A MONOPOLY over who can and can not bid and win ownership of every expired Australian domain name, every single day. I also told him his system was not fair, it was not transparent enough, and I couldn’t tell if “shill bidding” (fake bidding) was happening because there was no way to tell on his system and no competition to compare the domain bids.
• I asked him “Who is Raja Jata?” and he didn’t answer my question. [see: Who is Raja Jata].
• I asked him if he was doing “special deals” or discounts with certain domainer friends, and he said, “We don’t do special deals anymore“. I didn’t realise they did them in the first place?
• At that point, Anthony said he had to hang up and had to “go and make a phone call”.

The next thing I knew, my winning bid on the Finished Public Auction had been deleted, and instead, another bidder was granted the winning bid, and the amount was reduced from $325,000 to $250,000. Due to the fact that Drop‘s bidding structure increases by $25,000 at a time (when it’s over $100,000) it is unclear how they reduced this figure by $75,000 to the previous bidder, who came second, and plucked this figure out of thin air?

And this is another huge problem. Drop literally are judge, jury and executioners over dropping Australian domain names. Domain names, like in this case, worth HUNDREDS of THOUSANDS of DOLLARS. They answer to no one. And auDA does nothing to promote new competition. auDA continues to do nothing about Drop’s monopolistic behaviour, even when some of Australia’s largest multi-million-dollar corporations are losing their domains and may want to buy them back.

It was Coles Group Limited that was accidentally losing this “Superannuation.com.au” domain name today. Someone there appears to have forgotten to renew it, or perhaps a former employee?

Drop have so much power in this regard, uncontested and endorsed by auDA as an Accredited Registrar, that if Coles Group had wanted to buy their own domain name back, it would have been near impossible for them to know if the auction price was being “rigged”, or “shilled” and worse yet, if Drop.com.au wanted the domain for themselves, or one of their friends. There would have been near NOTHING Coles Group could have done to stop them, or be guaranteed transparency during the bidding process.

An example of this is what happened with the dropping domain “Domains.com.au”. Drop took this domain name off the daily list so NO ONE could bid on it, except themselves. The previous owner wanted to bid on his own domain name, to get it back, but Drop didn’t allow it. There are more examples.

I’m not saying Drop are “shill bidding” or “running the bids up” in the background for domain names. But I am saying, if they were, how would we know?

NO ONE is overseeing what Drop.com.au are doing. There’s NO ONE to complain to. There’s no ombudsman.

I have been shouting this from the rooftop for years, and this is only getting worse, and will continue to get worse. If I don’t continue to blow the whistle on this, WHO WILL?

It is clear Drop.com.au continue to be discriminatory towards me and my company and my clients, including many large corporations, who have been using DBR and Assets Australia to purchase expired domain names for over a decade.

And all because I SPEAK OUT AGAINST their unfair practices mentioned above, and that THEY ARE A MONOPOLY (because they are!), and because I publicly display domain drop sales prices for the public interest.

I wonder why they don’t want me publishing domain sales prices?

I request auDA to place a HOLD on this domain name and investigate Drop’s actions that have occurred as documented above.

Listed below is the trail of evidence in the order it occurred as a time line.

05-06-24

The below image shows “Superannuation.com.au” dropping on Wednesday 5th June, 2024, and still owned by Coles Group Ltd at that time.

06-06-24 – around 1pm AEST

The below image is screenshot proof that the auction had ended and I was the winner. Drop had been watching this happen for many hours, and watching me increase my bids MULTIPLE TIMES over many hours. They had also accepted my payment to bid in their public auction system the night before.

06-06-24 – around 1:30pm AEST

Anthony Peak rang me and the conversation above occurred. The Drop System then placed the domain name into the ownership of MY COMPANY: Assets Australia. I did NOT give them permission to revoke or change the ownership and had told them I would pay their invoice that they emailed me.

06-06-24 – around 1:30pm AEST

After the phone conversation above, Drop suddenly banned my access, as can be seen when I tried to login again (attached below).

They also deleted my bid, and randomly plucked $250,000 from thin air and allowed another bidder to win the domain name for that amount of money.

06-06-24 – around 2pm AEST

You can see below that Drop changed the ownership away my company, without my permission, to another company that had placed lower bids on their auction platform. They gave me no chance to pay the invoice. They gave me no written explanation as to why I could possibly be “banned”, other than the verbal phone conversation stated above.

Story developing…

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