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Namecheap accuses GoDaddy of delaying transfers

Kevin Murphy, March 7, 2018, 08:18:53 (UTC), Domain Registrars

GoDaddy broke ICANN rules and US competition law by delaying outbound domain transfers yesterday, and not for the first time, according to angry rival Namecheap.
March 6 was Namecheap’s annual Move Your Domain Day, a promotion under which it donates $1.50 to the Electronic Frontier Foundation for every inbound transfer from another registrar.
It’s a tradition the company opportunistically started back in 2011 specifically targeting GoDaddy’s support, later retracted, for the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act, SOPA.
But yesterday GoDaddy was delivering “incomplete Whois information”, which interrupted the automated transfer process and forced Namecheap to resort to manual verification, delaying transfers, Namecheap claims.
“First and foremost this practice is against ICANN rules and regulations. Secondly, we believe it violates ‘unfair competition’ laws,” the company said in a blog post.
Whois verification is a vital part of the transfer process, which is governed by ICANN’s binding Inter-Registrar Transfer Policy.
GoDaddy changed its Whois practices in January. As an anti-spam measure, it no longer publishes contact information, including email addresses vital to the transfer process, when records are accessed automatically over port 43.
However, GoDaddy VP James Bladel told us in January that this was not supposed to affect competing registrars, which have their IP addresses white-listed for port 43 access via a system coordinated by ICANN.
Did GoDaddy balls up its new restrictive Whois practices? Or can the blame be shared?
Namecheap also ran into problems with GoDaddy throttling port 43 on its first Move Your Domain Day in 2011, but DI published screenshots back then suggesting that the company had failed to white-list its IP addresses with ICANN.
This time, the company insists the white-list was not an issue, writing:

As many customers have recently complained of transfer issues, we suspect that GoDaddy is thwarting/throttling efforts to transfer domains away from them. Whether automated or not, this is unacceptable. In preparation for today, we had previously whitelisted IPs with GoDaddy so there would be no excuse for this poor business practice.

Namecheap concluded by saying that all transfers that have been initiated will eventually go through. It also asked affected would-be customers to complain to GoDaddy.
The number of transfers executed on Move Your Domain Day over the last several years appears to be well into six figures, probably amounting to seven figures of annual revenue.

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Comments (1)

  1. Richard Funden says:
    March 7, 2018 at 10:00 am

    Let’s see if they put their money where their mouth is and initiate a compliance action.

    Reply

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