Why would GoDaddy enable this ENS partnership? Obviously they have concerns about domains trading over disruptive, low friction, permissionless rails.

Because most people don't want to manage their domains, just like they don't want to self custody crypto.

But it doesn't take much imagination to see someone like gddy creating a lucrative crypto services biz line. One where a dual web2/web3 approach is pitched and monetized via their sales & marketing teams. One where accompanying web3 domains ... .eth @ top of list are recommended to accompany an owner's web2 property.

Use cases include redundancy of contact information, decentralized backup of content, and eventually zk services powered by ENS + .eth. What happens when gddy negotiates an affiliate markup (discount) with ens dao? $1 kept for $5 registration which is mostly passive and has massive upsell potential.

Registrars may even become effective lobbyists for reducing reg costs of .eths in the future to drive volume. Not hard to envision these players naturally acting on incentives that already exist....

Keep in mind, only ~2mm .eth domains are registered vs ~400mm total registered domains, and web2 is not in the game yet.

This integration shows that GoDaddy will focus more and more on accompanying services while they try to defend acquisition/disposition margins as long as they can. They are still the first stop as a web2 registrar, and they can hold onto this positioning for a while.