Go Daddy employee class action dismissed

A class action lawsuit alleging that Go Daddy committed “wage theft”, filed by a disgruntled former call center worker, has been dismissed by an Arizona court.
While the plaintiffs have been given leave to amend their complaint, they’ve parted ways with their lawyers after a disagreement, which suggests the case may be on shaky ground.
I reported on the filing of the suit for The Register last May, and followed it up with a tangential blog post here.
The lead plaintiff, Toby Harris, claims he was fired after just a couple of months as a Go Daddy sales/support call center guy after he questioned why some of his commissions had been withheld.
His manager had apparently rated his work below a certain performance threshold, meaning he lost out on over $1,300 of bonuses in his first month. Harris said this was arbitrary and unfair.
He was then fired after, according to his termination letter, breaking security protocol by failing to sufficiently validate a customer’s identity. Harris said he was fired because he was a “whistleblower”.
Four other former Go Daddy employees are named plaintiffs in the class action, which alleges that by treating commissions as discretionary bonuses, Go Daddy has avoided paying its call center staff legally owed overtime wages.
But a few weeks ago, the judge in the District Court where the case is being heard dismissed the complaint (pdf) on the grounds that it did not assert enough facts to support its claims.
While the judge gave plaintiffs the opportunity to re-file the complaint, their lawyers evidently decided it was not worth it. They withdrew from the case.
Judging by a court filing the lawyers made last week (pdf), and several claims made by Harris on the gripe site NoDaddy.com, it was not an amicable split. Harris now seems to be looking for replacement attorneys to file an amended complaint before time runs out.
The thread on the NoDaddy forum devoted to the class action is extraordinary. Started in May last year, it’s grown to over 1,600 posts, the majority of which are rants written by Harris, often addressing Go Daddy CEO Bob Parsons directly and in personal terms.

.CO quiet on Super Bowl sales

Judging from its CEO’s latest blog post, .CO Internet doesn’t want to talk about how many new .co domain names were registered following its Super Bowl commercial with Go Daddy.
I take this as a sign that the event did not have an earth-shattering impact on its registration numbers.
Making some basic assumptions, reading between the lines, and using some back-of-the-envelope math, I estimate that the number of new .co domains registered was likely less than 50,000.
That’s not terrible, but I think it could take quite some time for the company to see a return on its investment, given that its margins on the promotional pricing would have been pretty thin and that at least a quarter of those registrations will likely disappear a year from now.
I doubt it made enough cash on the day to pay for Joan Rivers’ boob job.
But in Juan Calle’s post, he makes it clear that .CO is playing the long game. He wrote:

The most common success metric that many registries use is the total number of domain names registered. Although we are certainly enjoying our incredible growth – the number of .CO domains registered is simply not a metric we believe is robust enough to measure the kind of impact we fully plan and expect to have in the world over the long term.

You can be fairly sure that if .CO had doubled the size of its customer base last week, or broke through the million-domain milestone, Calle would not be talking in these terms.
He’s not keen on using secondary market prices to define success either, saying he expects it will be four or five years before the .co aftermarket matures.
Sedo’s .co auction, which ended yesterday, saw the majority of domains fail to meet their lofty reserves. But that’s not necessarily a slight on .co – auction activity in general has been sluggish recently.
Calle has some fetal ideas about how to measure the success of a TLD. He wrote:

To gauge the impact of the .CO extension, I think we will need to consider a combination of factors. Imagine, if you will, a sort of “Gross Domain Product” or “GDP,” measuring not only the total number of .CO registrations, but the number of websites developed, and the broader value of the economic activity happening within the .CO space.

It’s an interesting idea, but there’s a reason why most people judge TLDs based on their number of registrations. It goes something like: registrations = revenue = profit.
Selling domains is generally a registry’s only revenue stream. A registry with few registrations won’t turn a profit, and stands less of a chance of staying in business.
And for the aftermarket, a TLD retaining a large number of registered and renewing domains over the long term means there’s demand, which leads to higher prices.
Fortunately for .co, it is off to a great start, with probably something approaching 700,000 domains under its belt in just seven months, if my envelope-back is reliable.
Calle’s post gives every indication that the company plans to keep up its aggressive marketing spend, so the TLD stands, I think, a pretty good chance of breaking through the one million domains mark this year.

DomainTools doubles prices, relaunches site

Whois specialist DomainTools has revamped its web site and raised the price of its services.
The price increase is quite substantial. The cheapest paid-for tier appears to be the $30-a-month Standard Membership, a 100% increase on the old $15 basic package.
Existing members have been grandfathered in at their current rates. DomainTools said that it’s the first price increase in five years.
It does appear that subscribers may get more bang for their buck under the new tiers. At least, my subscription appears to be buying me more services than it was before the relaunch.
But that may be because I was never entirely clear what I was paying for. The confusing old “unit”-based pricing has gone, and the new site is a lot clearer about what you get for the money.
Many of the other changes appear to be cosmetic. The site does look a bit slicker than before, while retaining its familiar look-and-feel.
The company also appears to have sorted out its dispute with Go Daddy, which recently started blocking Whois aggregators including DomainTools.
A few test look-ups I did for domains registered at Go Daddy returned full Whois results, not the stubs it was delivering following the block.
Given that registrars are allowed to charge $10,000 a year for access to bulk Whois records, I’m tempted to draw a connection between the Go Daddy situation and the price increase, but I have no hard information to support that conclusion.
UPDATE: I’ve heard from DomainTools that the Go Daddy situation has not yet been resolved.
DomainTools subscribers currently see full Whois records when they search for domains registered at Go Daddy. In order to throttle the vast majority of the traffic the site sends to Go Daddy’s servers, non-subscribers are still receiving incomplete data.
The dispute is evidently more complex than a simple $10k shakedown.

Gratuitous Go Daddy girl chest shot

I know, I know, I’m an utter hypocrite.
Complaining about the journalistic standards of The Sun in the morning and posting a photo that’s little better than a Page 3 shot in the evening.
I do so only in the spirit of crowd-sourced investigative journalism. And traffic, obviously.

In case you’re wondering, it’s the latest in the series of teaser shots Go Daddy has been releasing ahead of its Super Bowl 2011 commercial.
Note the strategic positioning of “.CO” on the T-shirt.
We’re supposed to start guessing who it is now.
Knock yourselves out.

Go Daddy’s new billion-dollar business?

Go Daddy has officially unveiled its Premium DNS service, which will enable its customers to buy and use managed DNSSEC services for the first time.
The price is $2.99 per month, which works out to $35.88 a year.
For the money, buyers also get a bunch of other tools, such as reports and audits, off-site DNS functionality and backup name servers.
There’s also a “Vanity Nameserver” option, which appears to let customers set their domain’s name servers to display as something like brand.domaincontrol.com, rather than ns1.domaincontrol.com.
It also appears that users of Go Daddy’s standard service will now be limited to 100 forwarded sub-domains, with Premium DNS users getting an unlimited number.
But the big deal as I see it is the addition of managed DNSSEC.
DNSSEC is a new security protocol that substantially mitigates the risk of falling prey to a DNS hijacking using, say, a cache poisoning attack.
Remember the Kaminsky Bug? DNSSEC prevents that kind of thing from happening again.
The problem with DNSSEC is that it’s massively complex and quite hard work to manage, requiring frequent key generation and rollover.
Go Daddy users can already manage their own DNSSEC records if they choose, but that’s only really an option if you’re a hard-core DNS geek.
Paying a few bucks a month to have somebody else manage it for you is an absolute bargain, if you care enough about your domain’s security.
I suggest that this could be a lucrative business for Go Daddy primarily because proponents of DNSSEC hope that one day it will be ubiquitous. Every domain will use it.
Go Daddy has over 45 million domains under management today. If customers representing only 1% of its domains choose to upgrade, that’s an extra $16 million into company coffers annually.
If they all do (which is not going to happen) we’re talking about a $1.6 billion business.
I don’t think the new service is going to lead to a massive uptick in the number of signed domains, but it will certainly get the ball rolling. For enterprises, it’s good value.
But individuals and large domain portfolio holders will not flock to return to 1999 .com prices just in order to implement a protocol they’ve been doing just fine without.
The future of broad DNSSEC adoption is more likely to be in open-source and freeware tools and services that can be easily understood by geeks and non-geeks alike.

Gratuitous Go Daddy girl butt photo

Apologies to lady readers for the blatant sexism.
And apologies to discerning readers of both genders for shamelessly buying into Go Daddy’s propaganda machine.
But it is a very, very nice photograph.

Any guesses who the new Go Daddy girl will be?
She’s almost certainly Latina. Probably Colombian, given the .CO Internet tie-in Go Daddy’s planning for the Super Bowl.
Shakira’s probably too expensive.
Mike Berkens reckons Sofia Vergara is a likely candidate, but I’ve no idea who she is because I’m British.
I’ve managed to rule out Heather Mills McCartney and Queen Latifah.

Go Daddy files UDRP on “Mad Dog” host

Go Daddy has filed a UDRP complaint against a web hosting company that uses a similar brand to sell domain names, maddogwebhosting.com.
The domain appears to have been used by a small-time hosting reseller for about two years. Its mailing address is a flat in south London.
But Go Daddy subsidiary Mad Dog Domains, which also sells hosting, has been around for longer and appears to have a trademark on its brand.
It’s not really an open-and-shut case by UDRP standards, given that Mad Dog Web Hosting appears to be a legitimate site, but I suspect Go Daddy has a reasonably good chance of prevailing.
We’ll have to wait for the ruling to be made and published by WIPO to find out the full details.

Go Daddy passes 45 million domains milestone

Go Daddy now has 45 million domain names under management.
That’s the word from Scottsdale tonight. The news comes less than a year after the registrar announced its 40 millionth domain name registration.
According to the company, it “is registering, renewing or transferring a domain name every eight-tenths of a second” and is now “larger than eight of its closest competitors combined”.
Obviously, this is great news for Go Daddy.
It also means that the company is in a very dominant position in the market, which may attract more attention in future.

Go Daddy offers Whois privacy for .co domains

.CO Internet has started allowing registrars to offer Whois privacy services for .co domains, according to Go Daddy.
In a blog post, Go Daddy’s “RachelH”, wrote:

When the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and .CO Internet S.A.S. drafted the .co policy earlier this year, they decided to hold off on private registration to prevent wrongful use of the new ccTLD — especially during the landrush. Now that .co has carved its place among popular TLDs, you can add private registration to your .co domain names.

Unless I’m mistaken, ICANN had no involvement in the creation of .co’s policies, but I don’t think that’s relevant to the news that .co domains can now be made private.
During its first several months, .CO Internet has been quite careful about appearing respectable, which is why its domains are relatively expensive, why its trademark protections were fairly stringent at launch, and why it has created new domain takedown policies.
It may be a sign that the company feels confident that its brand is fairly well-established now that it has decided to allow Whois privacy, which is quite often associated with cybersquatting (at least in some parts of the domain name community).
It could of course also be a sign that it wants to give its registrars some love – by my estimates a private registration would likely double their gross margin on a .co registration.

Go Daddy-Google group targets bogus pill merchants

The newly forming industry body tasked with taking down web sites selling fake pharmaceuticals plans to meet next month to develop its mission statement and charter, according to Go Daddy general counsel Christine Jones.
Jones said in an interview tonight that the group, which Go Daddy is jointly “spearheading” with Google, is likely to meet in Phoenix, Arizona in the third week of January.
As I blogged earlier today, the organization was formed following a series of meetings at the White House, which has a policy of reducing counterfeit drugs sales online.
Domain name companies including Go Daddy, eNom, Neustar and Network Solutions are joined in the currently nameless non-profit by the three major search engines and all the major payment processors.
Jones confirmed that redirecting a domain name is an action a participating registrar could take if it finds an infringing site. Go Daddy and others already do this in cases of child porn, for example.
But the group will also share information about fake pharma sites so Google, for example, would also be able to block them from search and Visa could stop payments being processed, Jones told me.
The White House meetings were organized by Victoria Espinel, the administration’s Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator (IPEC).
So, while the group has yet to formalize its policies, I wanted to know what the prevailing opinion is on how “illegal” a site will have to be before the group will try to take it down.
Taking down a site selling sugar pills or industrial acid as HIV treatments is one thing, killing a site selling genuine medications to people without prescriptions is another, and blocking a legit pharmacy that sells drugs to Americans with prescriptions more cheaply from across the Canadian border is yet another.
Jones said: “If a pharmacy is a licensed pharmacy and is abiding by whatever the state rules are wherever they’re located, that’s not our target.”
Apparently the new organization, which will be formed as a non-profit entity, may help the companies to avoid running afoul of ECPA, the US Electronic Communications Privacy Act.
Jones said that other companies participating in the White House meetings still have not decided whether to join the new group or not. End-of-year budgetary issues may be a factor here.
Domain registrars have come in for considerable flak over 2010 for allegedly not doing enough to counter fake pharma sites.
A Knujon report published in May, and others, eventually led to eNom in particular promising to crack down harder on rogue pharmacies.