Say NoDaddy
NoDaddy.com was created by Fyodor three days ago. It’s a work in progress that will allow web users to see and add complaints related to the large registrar. So far the only complaint documented on the site is from Fyodor himself and it offers more details than his initial complaint on the seclists news mailing list.
In a News.Com article, GoDaddy general counsel Christine Jones “pointed out that GoDaddy’s terms of service say the company ‘reserves the right to terminate your access to the services at any time, without notice, for any reason whatsoever.’” In that same article, Jones refuses to rule out suspending a site such as News.Com if a reader posts illegal information in a discussion forum. In another article, Wired reporter Kevin Poulsen catches Jones in a lie. When Kevin notes that GoDaddy shut down the domain only 52 seconds after leaving the voicemail, not one hour as Jones previously claimed, Jones “admits she doesn’t know exactly how much notice [Fyodor] had” and declares that “I think the fact that we gave him notice at all was pretty generous”.
CNet has surveyed several registrars in the fallout of this dispute to find their opinions on the situation. My favourite registrar of the bunch is Gandi. When questioned about what they would have done, they revealed they recently had to deal with someone who claimed to be a representative of MySpace. Their response showed the most even handed response of the survey respondants.
We can tell the difference between a mailing list, an offensive post in a forum, and spam. Our investigative process would have told us what action to take, and we would have been able to justify our action with confidence to all of CNET’s readers.
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In the majority of cases, however, we send an e-mail to the domain’s owner, giving them the opportunity to correct the problem. We even go so far as to call the telephone number provided in the Whois data for the domain, in order to speak with the domain name owner in person.
Gandi claims they’d follow the solution that I’d greatly prefer: email and phone the owner first, and I’m certain they’d give the registrant more than 52 seconds. If I ever need to register some .com, .net or .org domains I know where to go.
For the curious: nodaddy.com was registered with DirectNIC, nodaddy.us was registered with Moniker.
My initial reaction was covered in my previous entry.
