I'm not sure about Godaddy, but on Gandi you can definitely pay to extend someone else's domain name.

https://docs.gandi.net/en/domain_names/renew/how_to_renew.ht...

That's wild. I had had no idea.

Happened to microsoft: https://slashdot.org/story/99/12/25/114201/microsoft-hotmail...

Thats not the same thing. The domain lapsed and someone else bought it, which is exactly what is going to happen to eth.link according to this post.

From the horses mouth:

> I read through the discussion area for that story and found that the problem had been tracked down to an outstanding invoice for passport.com at Network Solutions, the domain name registrar.

> I own a number of domains myself, including doublewide.net, so I'm no stranger to the payment system at Network Solutions. I went to the payment page at https://payments.networksolutions.com and typed in "passport.com", after which I was greeted with a page showing the outstanding invoice for $35. One of the buttons near the bottom of the page was "Make payment", so I pressed it.

https://web.archive.org/web/20031002153020/http://www.double...

Ha, what a great story; thanks for sharing.

> On Tuesday, December 28 I heard from Microsoft. I was happy to hear that the payment did fix Passport, and of course they wanted to reimburse me, and thank me.

With companies so lawyer-ed up, I wonder if that would be the case today. I'd be very hesitant before hitting submit in that payment page.

Too late to edit, thats a wild story, thanks for sharing it!