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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."
I just renewed a domain for 2 yrs with them and I sort of regret it. GoDaddy used to be a top-notch outfit. Low prices and no nonsense. These days it's low prices and lots of nonsense. Between the GoDaddy spam, other spammers they support via special arrangements, and their incredibly convoluted ordering and pricing schemes it's no wonder they're starting to plumb the depths of sleaze.
The thing is their prices are so great it's really hard to justify going someplace else. You can pay up to $35 a year at some of the boutique registrars.
About six months ago, GoDaddy held 78 (yes, seventy-eight) of our domains hostage. They had all of our sites down (we receive approximately 2 million web server hits per day, about 160,000 unique sessions) for nearly 48 hours while we wrangled control of our domains back.
What was their excuse?
Someone outside of our organization had (for whatever unknown reason, as this is not our business) spammed using ONE of our domains as a the spoofed header-from domain. And yes, we publish SPF records. That wont stop idiots from trying.
Anyway, I personally spent close to one hour on the phone with their "abuse" people (ironic that they consider what we were doing abusive). I explained the situation over and over to no avail. We escalated to their lead "abuse" person. Same story. "Your domain was in a spam and we do not allow this"... When I would try to explain that it was not from us or on our behalf in any way, shape, or form -- we were curtly told "that's not what we've been told."
Now, I had also received the spam complaint. Their "abuse" ("abusive") people were going solely off what was written in this complaint itself. In ALL CAPS, the user cried bloody murder about "I DID NOT SIGN UP AND DO NOT WANT SPAMS FROM THESE PEOPLE"... GoDaddy did not lift one finger to actually investigate the situation and instead took the end users' word for it.
We had to get our lawyers involved. We had to fax them threatening letters. Finally, they so gracefully allowed us to tranfer our domains away from GoDaddy to another registrar for the very low highjacking fee of $50 per domain we were going to transfer.
Again -- this was not a spam from us, for us, or by us. It was a completely third party individual just randomly choosing our domain to spoof.
GoDaddy is a goddamn scam and I hope their company gets burnt someday. It would not surprise me if the spam was created by them for the specific purpose of looting their more deep-pocketed customers through these $50 "re-activation" fees. Month getting slow? Craft up another fake spam. Fuckers.
Yes. The registrar has no business doing anything but the following:
OK, your bills are payed. Now when people type A, A is resolved to IP B instead of C (a parking page)
It's the responsibility of law enforcement to enforce law. But, in your own argument, the site is hosted in an anarchistic country. We (and whatever country the registrar is based in) have NO BUSINESS imposing law or right/wrong on another sovergn country OR IT'S CITIZENS OR BUSINESSES. We can yell/scream/make noise/threaten as much as we want, but we cannot enforce our views on them.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Exactly, I had one of my domain names held hostage by them about 5 months ago. They told me they had received a complaint about spam for my domain and so I was required to pay $199USD. I told them to fuck off and wanted to transfer the domain to netsol, but godaddy REFUSED to allow me to transfer without first paying them the $200. I took me more than a month of yelling at their 'managers' on the phone who didn't give a shit about ICANN regulations before they allowed the transfer.
Godaddy's policies are terrible, they will do anything to make extra money.
MABASPLOOM!
You seem to have forgotten to indicate any reason why you would see this as acceptable.
I didn't forget -- I just thought it was obvious. For the benefit of the slow learners in the class, I'll repeat myself: Domain name registrars should not get into the content policing business. Today it's spam, which everybody agrees is terrible and should be stopped. Tomorrow it will be with some other type of disfavored content.
Why would you force registrars to act according to your will?
I see it the other way around -- the registrar is trying to force their will on me. GoDaddy is making a value judgement based on the content associated with the domain name. By disabling the name, they are removing my ability to access that content (yeah, sure, I could do it by IP address, but we have DNS for a reason).
The key sequence to access my Slashdot bookmark in Firefox is Alt-B-S. I don't believe this is a coincidence.
I rather read that as GoDaddy imposing restrictions on the clients of another registrar. That hardly seems like behaviour we would wish to encourage.
Speaking of slipperly slopes, GoDaddy stand to make almost 300k from this stick up. I mean, it isn't as if this is going to solve anything, and it isn't as if GoDaddy are blocking them unconditionally. They're just saying "we want a slice of you're ill gotten gains or we drop all your packets.
The thing is, if we let this pass, that gives lots of registrars an incentive to start eforcing the law as they see it, and for material gain. That's going to encourage them to define ill-doing on the net loosely, since they get tp shake down more nets
Are you saying that the worst murderous mobsters can operate massive criminal enterprises on a website hosted in an anarchistic country and their registrar should be prevented from denying them service?
You're either trolling, or else you're taking way too much for granted here.
For example it's far from clear that murderous mobsters are involved, let along the worst sort (unless you define unsoilicited junk email as being identical to the unlawful taking of human life, that is). The criminality is open to question too since spamming is not (sadly) universally illegal.
And that's just the domains registered to MajorDomo.ru. GoDaddy are demanding money with manaces from all those domains. Unless Majordomo have some weird negative vetting process for thier clients, then the chances are that not all of them are crooks.
I can't see how GoDaddy have any ethical justification for their actions here, and I can't think of a single pargmatic reason why we should condone their behaviour
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
Pay the $50, move your domains, chargeback the $50 and/or file a suit in small claims court.
They'll dispute the filing and keep pulling out parts of their license agreement to counter it. Dispute the agreement as being invalid. When all is said and done, you'll be out a few days of work, GoDaddy will have wasted a ton on lawyers.
(Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, this is Slashdot, use common sense, this is not advice, you are feeling sleepy...sleepy...SLEEPY...you want to buy me a 50" HDTV.)
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...by far is DirectNIC.
$15 and no bullshit.
To me they are like the Google of registrars - "do no evil".
They even are based out of NOLA and had very little if any downtime during Katrina. You can read about it and see damage to their building here:
http://interdictor.livejournal.com/
Libertas in infinitum