The closest thing that comes to mind for me is that Go Daddy is both one of the largest domain name registrars in the world, and they have a pretty big business in domain brokering.
Because all domain names are inherently one-of-a-kind, there are many business that buy domains with potentially good traffic or interesting names and put them up for sale, in the hopes of some day making a big score by selling that domain to someone willing to pay the price.
I would love to be able to say that I would never support such practices, but I had to get infinityfree.com from a company like that too, so maybe I’m part of the problem.
The grey boxes usually indicate a web page that uses lazy loading: first send the basic HTML page, and then asynchronously load in the rest of the content. This usually makes the page more responsive, but if you have a very slow or unstable internet connection, you can get stuck with those gray boxes.
The client area has a few locations with “grey boxes” too. Don’t worry: it’s not a virus, it’s not just you, it’s there by design.
It is possible, but it takes a few hundred thousand dollars to get an extension, and then tens of thousands per year to use it. And that’s just the ICANN fees, you then still need to build or purchase the infrastructure necessary to actually operate it.
It’s definitely possible for bigger businesses to get an extension, but it takes quite a bit of money and motivation to get one, and it’s definitely not just a money printer.
Yes, I saw it too (and fixed it, if you don’t mind).
The reason is that you used tilde characters to try and make a line. But this forum supports Markdown, and ~~~ is used to assign the start of a code block. I changed it to a line using dashes, which is rendered as an actual horizontal line.