Does Your Registrar Have Your Back?

Ever since I first read about Godaddy taking the SecLists.Org site offline because of a request from Myspace, they had objected to some content someone posted to a mailing list that they archive, I have wondered if I should be looking to change to another registrar, and I figure I am not alone. The gentleman who owned the website, he says his name is Fyodor, says that Godaddy left him a voicemail telling him that his domain was scheduled for suspension, followed by the Domain Suspension Notice exactly 52 seconds later, and that neither had any contact information at all, meaning he had to call general support and spend hours on the phone just tog et the reason why, let alone get it fixed. He has posted the full story here.

He has also registered the domain name Nodaddy.com and is using it to build a community around people who have had similar trouble, or, I assume any kind of trouble, and start their own anti-godaddy site. It has news and links to more articles about this story, as well as a call for members, a Nodaddy girl and more.

Even after this episode made news worldwide, GoDaddy refused to admit they were wrong. 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”. Is this the sort of company you would hire to manage your domain names? This could happen to any site which allows reader comments or other user generated content. Source: Nodaddy.com

Of course companies expect stuff like this to happen, but this guy has some traffic he can use, some media coverage he can take advantage of and a clue on how to build up a website. So, this is definitely a losing situation for them, unless of course the site dies and no one submits any other stories, etc.

News.com has an article today that discusses this, asks the question is your registrar free speech friendly and poses 10 questions to the 12 registrars that they “tried” to interview as some did not answer the questions. Two registrars stood out, Gandi.net and New Orleans-based DirectNIC, Gandi.net said they would take extensive steps to contact them, DirectNIC said they would only take down a site without a court order if the site focused on child porn or phishing. The folks from Gandi.net even said someone claiming to be from Myspace made a similar request, but because they gave no justification and they could not get in contact with Myspace, no action was taken. Here are the questions they asked, for responses and more info, read the News.com article here.

1. Under what circumstances will you suspend a customer’s domain name based on the content of his or her Web site, in the absence of a court order?

2. How many times a month, on average, do you suspend a customer’s domain name based on the content of his or her Web site?

3. What are the most common reasons for suspension?

4. How many domain names do your customers currently have registered through you?

5. Go Daddy last week suspended its customer’s domain, Seclists.org, because of a complaint from MySpace. Would you have done the same thing in the same way if Seclists.org happened to be your customer?

6. If you do suspend domain names in the absence of a court order, what procedures do you have in place to ensure that the customer is notified beforehand and given adequate opportunity to respond?

7. Do you believe that your most important responsibility is to provide technical services to paying customers–or is it to police the content of their Web sites, FTP sites, and so on?

8. Are you attempting to recruit Go Daddy customers as a result of last week’s news about Seclists.org?

9. If you do suspend domain names in the absence of a court order, how do your customers go about getting their sites restored?

10. Do you have a dedicated department or person who handles issues related to domain name suspensions?

Dotster, Melbourne IT, NameKing, Network Solutions, Register.com, Tucows and eNom did not respond to the survey, and Moniker.com just sent a statement that answered some of their questions.

Posted by Jimmy Daniels Posted in: Domain Registrars, Security 2 Comments » February 2007