If you had asked me in 1997 what a site called GoDaddy.com was for, I would almost certainly have guessed something related to sex trade (a 13 year-old mind will do that, but the name certainly helps). Today that site is for sale, and it remains the largest domain name registrar in the world.

GoDaddy is up for auction and is expected to pull down as much as a billion dollars. The company currently has more than 43 million domain names under management. I really wonder what made Bob Parsons, who founded the company, want to give it up. It’s about as steady a business model as you could ask for – subscription based revenue stream in a continuously growing industry with upsell opportunity and an infinite market saturation point. Uh, what’s bad about that? And revenue of the company sat right around $800 million in 2009.

Could Parsons have a new pet project? Maybe, but he could just be done with all the work that comes with running a billion dollar company. Guess we’ll see when it hits auction.

There’s big news today for anyone interested in blocking (or finding) porn. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers today approved the “.xxx” top-level domain tag.

This is especially nice for organizations (or parents) that want a reliable way to block pornographic material. Granted, not everyone has to ascribe to the domain name, but doesn’t pornhub.xxx look better than pornhub.com?

Strangely enough, the initial response from anti-porn activists was negative. The claim? That this will encourage the proliferation of digital erotica. Yeah, because right now porn is super hard to find.