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How does ESPN control the domain espn.go.com if they don't control the tld of go.com. How is this possible?

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closed as not constructive by EEAA, RobM, Michael Hampton, mdpc, Adrian Oct 30 '12 at 5:01

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2 Answers

up vote 4 down vote accepted

Whois shows that Disney controls go.com. ESPN is majority owned by Disney.

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up vote 6 down vote

espn.go.com is delegated to a separate set of nameservers by go.com, which means that the manager of go.com has ceded management of espn.go.com to a potentially different party:

espn.go.com.            300     IN      NS      ns02.espn.go.com.
espn.go.com.            300     IN      NS      ns01.espn.go.com.
espn.go.com.            300     IN      NS      ns03.espn.go.com.

These nameservers might be run by ESPN, in which case they have created the A record for espn.go.com:

espn.go.com.            30      IN      A       68.71.216.176

I can't find any evidence that ns0{1..3}.espn.go.com are actually run by ESPN however -- they may be run by the same people as go.com itself. If this is the case, then go.com have simply created this DNS record which points to ESPN's servers. ESPN don't control the DNS zone in this case, they just run the HTTP server which the record happens to point to.

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