GoDaddy Hits Bump on Road to Super Bowl

• By Isabel Wang on January 26, 2007

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Last night Jon Price asked if GoDaddy's "Road to Super Bowl" promotion reaches the right kind of audience: "fast cars = domains? I can have a hot model if I buy a domain? I'll be a super-stud if a buy a domain? It's fun to buy domains as a prank on your buds at work? Uh, whatever."

That's my reaction as well, but if GoDaddy is willing to bet millions on its ability to convert the average sports lover into an avid domain collector, I guess I'll have to suspend my disbelief. On the other hand, what I'm 100% certain of is the very negative impression GoDaddy has made on existing domain owners (including myself) with its Seclists fiasco.

Seclists.org is home to some 250,000 pages of security mailing list archives and other resources. One of the pages contained data from MySpace's recent phishing incident. In response to MySpace's removal request, GoDaddy nuked the entire site by changing its nameserver to "NS1.SUSPENDED-FOR.SPAM-AND-ABUSE.COM". (GoDaddy is just the registrar, BTW. The site traceroutes to SVColo.com.)

Seclists owner Fyodor Vaskovich and GoDaddy general counsel Christine Jones played "he said, she said" in this CNET article. Christine said GoDaddy tried to contact Fyodor, but did not hear back from him until about an hour later. She acknowledged that GoDaddy is "probably the most aggressive" among registrars in handling abuse complaints.

Fyodor said his site was taken down 56 seconds after GoDaddy left him a voicemail. He contacted GoDaddy repeatedly, and was told by Craig, Ricky and Wael that the abuse department doesn't take calls. CNet agreed that the logs he produced backed up his story. Christine did not respond to CNet's follow-up questions in time for its article, but she admitted to Wired later on that she actually didn't know how much notice Fyodor was given. Nonetheless, she insisted that even the 56 second notice was "pretty generous".

University of Miami law professor Michael Froomkin said he's never heard of registrars taking down sites without a court order. He suggested that "some people might feel safer with a registrar that's a little more pro-customer". And Techdirt pointed out that the offending content Myspace complained about had been spread all over the net. GoDaddy did little to make the world a safer place by taking Seclists offline. Peter Cashmore from Mashable added that it's deeply worrying when registrars become censors.

The sites I mentioned above collectively reach more domain buyers than GoDaddy will with its Super Bowl ad. After this incident, I'm afraid it'll take a lot more than GoDaddy girl videos to convince these customers that GoDaddy is a company they want to do business with.

One of the Web hosting industry's longest-standing citizens, Isabel Wang is also a high-tech enthusiast. Through her WHIR blog, she examines the impact emerging Web technologies will have on the Web hosting business, and on the motivations of hosting consumers. Isabel has been in the web hosting ... (Read full bio)

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