Following up on this submission. I used the example of "Smell.tv" in that post, the one I'm actually looking for is Aquarium.tv. Who cares. Snipe it from me if you want, I'm probably not buying it after all this anyway. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41393638

HN, help me out here: *Is Aquarium.tv registered or not*? Because the NIC.tv WHOIS service operated by GoDaddy says it's a "Reserved Domain Name", but GoDaddy's Domain Broker Service says it's owned by a "third party". Those things can't both be true, right?

Anyway, here's the letter I just sent to Tuvalu. Who knows if anything will come of it. I don't think they have much of a staff.

> To whom it may concern at the Godaddy Registry and the Tuvalu Ministry of Justice, Communications and Foreign Affairs,

> I'm writing to express a concern about the inaccuracy of WHOIS data returned by the .tv registry. For the last few weeks, I have been making inquiries about the purchase of the domain Aquarium.tv. (You see, I'm running a company at Aquareum.tv, and lots of people are likely to type the name in the other way.) A WHOIS lookup performed at https://whois.nic.tv/ returns the following response for that domain:

> Reserved Domain Name

> This response is generally used to indicate that a domain is reserved by the registry — in this case, either GoDaddy or Tuvalu MJCFA — either permanently or as a "Premium" name to be sold at a higher price. So far, there's nothing unusual happening.

> However, I recently paid GoDaddy $119.99 for their Domain Broker Service for the domain anyway, to see if anything could be done. [Redacted] at GoDaddy has informed me that the owner of the domain is a "third party completely separate from us", and that they would be willing to sell me the domain for $10,000 USD. Now we have hit a contradiction. Aquarium.tv cannot be a "Reserved Domain Name" and owned by a "third party" at the same time. Which is it? *Is Aquarium.tv registered or not?*

> My concern is from the outside, it generates the appearance that GoDaddy themselves is reserving this domain name, while fraudulently claiming that a third party owns it for the purpose of selling it at a higher price. But I'm sure there's an innocent explanation — perhaps the WHOIS data is just inaccurate for some reason?

> Thank you for your time, > Eli Mallon