Company discloses acquisition price for Neustar business.
GoDaddy (NYSE: GDDY) unveiled its acquisition price for Neustar along with GoDaddy’s first-quarter earnings today. It is paying $218 million for the business and expects the transaction to close “in the coming months.”
The domain name company announced the acquisition last month.
With Neustar, GoDaddy will now control both the wholesale and retail side of many domain names. Neustar operates .us, .co, and .biz, among other domain names.
Neustar is currently owned by a private equity consortium led by Golden Gate Capital, which scooped up the business in 2017. The registry business sale is a carveout of the marketing data, security, and intelligence company.
Let’s hope they fix the spoiled .US cctld. The WHOIS riddled with overseas registrants with no no business in the USA. I’m talking amazon / ebay affiliate sites! Yes, even scams.
Neustar is too inept to uphold their own TOS! When US GOV gave control, did they expect this to happen? It’s all about the $$$$$. New owners could care less about their obligations. And ICANN doesn’t lift a finger! Getting screwed, mislead and lied to from the highest levels. Failure to function.
You buy a .US, believing it’s an exclusive property and you really get a ghetto rife with fraud. The image has been destroyed by bad actors. Domaining complacent.
ICANN has no saying on policies of ccTLDs, .US included.
Is it normal/healthy for a company to be registry and registrar at the same time ? I know this is America, but it seems to me there may be conflicts of interests or reason for an antitrust probe.
Godaddy is already the biggest registrar, by far.
Most registries (excluding Verisign) have affiliate registrars. However, there are specific provisions in the registry agreements mandating some non-discrimination across registrars (specification 9, https://www.icann.org/sites/default/files/tlds/org/org-agmt-html-30jun19-en.htm).
Just wait until GoDaddy gets acquired by Amazon!
No it’s not healthy at all. case in point Uniregistry/registrar.
Owned the registry domains (tax man). Owned the registrar to sell them (R/E broker).
Registrar promotes – pushes their own registry domains exclusively.
As said registrar convinces you that there will be no price increases, to sell that ‘Real-estate’, the registry side jacks up the ‘taxes’ (1000% higher)..squeezing you out of the home they just sold you with ‘higher taxes’.
Of course, if you have a bag of money sitting around, you can renew for 10 years and *hope* he doesn’t squeeze you more at the end of that term.
ICANN seem to think that’s alright.
Andrew,
Neustar was bought in 2017 for 2.9 Billion and now it sells for 218 mil. ?
What mi missing here?
This is just a carve out of its registry biz, not the entire business.
Quite a lot. Neustar as an entirety hasn’t been sold this time, only their registry business has. That’s why the headline of this article reads “Neustar’s registry business”
GoDaddy has gone to the dark side.
May the force be with domain investors.
thanks for sharing this
Enough Godaddy! Stay away from other registries. You want to dominate this domain industry and do your monopoly thing.. Your prices already sky rocketing.
Congrats!
Wow…
Waiting for the good news from GoDaddy ….