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GoDaddy Holds Domains Hostage
saikou writes "There were previous reports of GoDaddy, one of the biggest domain name registrars, attacking Bittorrent sites with frivolous interpretation of their own Terms of Service (that story was resolved), and now similar events unfold with clients of one of Russian domain registrars Majordomo.ru -- GoDaddy has informed them that all 1399 client domains are now blocked (story in Russian) due to 'many of your domain names were
listed in the Spamhaus.org blacklist or were resolving to a name server
or IP address listed in the Spamhaus.org blacklist' with a demand of a neat '$199 non-refundable
administration fee to the credit card on file for your account for each
domain name you wish to reactivate' or $50 for each domain to be transferred out into another registrar.
I am all for fighting spam, but given how unreliable spam black-lists are such actions simply damage the internet. Instead of affecting people that use spam lists to control the inflow of mail to some degree, all users are effectively forced to be black-list clients.
Now all one needs to shut down a site is a few reports of spamming, and the domain (or even better, all domains of a given small registrar) will be suspended."
Once we allow domain registrars to become the Spam Police, very soon there will be political pressure for them to become the Content Police. It starts with spam and kiddie pron -- content that 99.999% of the world agrees is wrong. I guarantee it won't stop there.
The key sequence to access my Slashdot bookmark in Firefox is Alt-B-S. I don't believe this is a coincidence.
How is this little more then extortion? They have a thinly veiled reason, but let's say the spammers pay up. Their domain is re-activated. What then? How does that stop them from being spammers? This is just GoDaddy grabbing people willy nilly and forcing them to pay for fees they've already paid for.
The most fucked-up thing about this story is not the blocking of 1399(!) domains, but the fact that fact they CAN be reactivated, if only you pay 199$(!!) for "administration fees". This is not about policing the internet, it's about squeezing more money out of their customers. If this guy pays up, what prevents them from doing the same shit all over again 2 years from now? Hell, I'd like to know what their legal justification is now. Correct me if I'm wrong, but unless they are are hosting the stuff, they have no liabliity here, do they? Huh. I wonder if this can be used as an admissin on their end of being liable for content and actions of domains registered under them? Talk about watching an avalanche begin....
"can't run, can't hide...oh well, return 0"
a company selling $2 domain names is shady!!!
Whats next, are you going to tell me that used car dealers can be less than fully honest? SAY IT AINT SO!
Why? How complex do you think hosting a name <-> IP table is, especially when the basic, long-proven infrastructure costs are spread across tens of millions of domains.
Network Solutions, the other end of the cost scale, has hardly been a model of good registrar behaviour. In fact most people consider them the scummiest, shadiest of the group.
I don't know about the yacht in international waters, but I agree that Spamhaus wreaks havoc on organizations that have done nothing wrong. Our organization has been black listed before too, and it was in error. It finally got cleared up, but it is still damaging.
We stopped using RBL's a long time ago, and have swtiched to something called Securence http://www.securence.com/. It has been much more reliable than RBL's, and keeps the junk from ever getting to our server in the first place. I haven't had a complaint about a false positive since we switched, and it blocks over 100,000 spam/viruses/phishing attempts a day.
I struggled for days and days and all I got was this lousy sig.
That's a shame. I've got a lot of domains with godaddy.com but am testing out other registrars and will be migrating more away. It's not just these sorts of reports, but also their switch to Microsoft IIS for parked domains that bothers me some.
The sad thing is that this sort of thing on their part really won't hurt all that much. How much money would they have made on each of your domains for the next *10* years? $30? I'm basing this on $3 profit ($9 - $6 wholesale cost - maybe it's different for them?) By forcing you to leave they've almost doubled that, and they don't have any work to do to service you for the next 10 years either!
If they could simply extract $50 from every single domain-name-only customer to transfer away they would be *far* more profitable than they are now because there'd be less overhead and work to do.
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