Go Daddy opens Indian call center — a portent?

Let’s hope this isn’t the beginning of the end for Go Daddy.
When newly installed CEO Warren Adelman abruptly quit and took a back-seat advisory role at the company last week, my gut reaction was that all is not well at Go Daddy.
CEOs of companies with new owners don’t just up and quit eight months into the job unless there are performance problems or substantial disagreements about management style, in my view.
Adelman was replaced on an interim basis by Scott Wagner of Go Daddy’s main investor, the private equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co.
The news a couple of days later that KKR had appointed a new exec to oversee Go Daddy in India also caught my attention.
I was half tempted to write a post there and then speculating that Go Daddy was about to shift its flagship customer service operations — currently based in the US — to India.
While that news hasn’t arrived yet, the company has today confirmed that it has opened a call center in Hyderabad.
Today, the new facility appears to be limited to supporting Indian customers, according to a press release:

A team of local agents, who speak local languages, are now providing Go Daddy’s brand of award-winning customer service to Indian customers. Since opening a little more than one month ago, agents have taken more than 10,000 calls, mostly from entrepreneurs and business owners. To date, Go Daddy India now supports more than 120,000 customers.

But for how long will this be true?
Private equity firms exist to buy companies, make them more profitable, and flip them for a return on their investment. That usually means cutting costs in unpopular ways.
With the new owners in charge, I have to wonder if Go Daddy’s excellent US-based call centers — a constant source of bragging rights in the Bob Parsons era — are at risk.
It’s a lot more expensive to hire wage-slaves in Arizona than India.
I expect that decision will come down to whether Go Daddy starts to view its American call centers as a cost center, rather than a profit center, and whether it thinks it can ship the function overseas without sacrificing quality and alienating its US and other English-speaking customers.
Shipping jobs to cheaper climes might look like a no-brainer on paper, but there’s ample opportunity for #fail in this case.
If, of course, it ever happens. This article is pure speculation.

Go Daddy, Neustar and eNom join White House fake pharma takedown project

Big name companies from the domain name industry are among those leading a new White House-backed project aimed at tackling bogus internet pharmacies.
DI first reported on the formation of the Center for Safe Internet Pharmacies back in December 2010, but it only fully announced itself on Monday this week.
It’s a US-based public-private partnership that counts Go Daddy, Neustar and eNom among its members. Other participants include Google, Microsoft, PayPal and Yahoo.
The project was announced along with officials from the US Department of State and the Food and Drug Administration at an event in Washington DC earlier this week.
The goals are consumer education and enforcement action against “rogue” pill sites.
Go Daddy’s acting general counsel Nima Kelly said in a statement:

Go Daddy’s partnership with the Center for Safe Internet Pharmacies is to help create awareness and fund educational campaigns in conjunction with the FDA. Go Daddy is also hosting the safemedsonline.org site pro bono.

Neustar vice president of business affairs Jeff Neuman, who’s also treasurer of CSIP, told us:

the overall goals of CSIP include providing a neutral forum for sharing relevant information about illegal US internet pharmacies among members and aiding law enforcement efforts where appropriate.
…
Neustar is working with the rest of the partners to address rogue pharmacies at their very source—their web addresses. Neustar has been and will continue to be vigilant in taking down rogue sites that contain malware and those that do not comply with our acceptable use policies – which include compliance with applicable drug laws.

Go Daddy tones down the sex for Olympics ads

Go Daddy CEO Warren Adelman recently promised a less salacious image for the company, and its new commercial, set to air in the US during the London 2012 Olympics, delivers.
Kinda.
The attractive female spokemodel is still in attendance, but she’s matched up with a data center geek stereotype. The idea is to show that the company is not just a pretty face. Or something.
It’s all very self-conscious.

Unless it’s nothing more sophisticated than a “beaver” joke, the otter reference went completely over my head.
UPDATE: A reader speculates that the otter may be a high-brow reference to the Leonardo painting Lady With An Ermine.
According to Wikipedia, the ermine (a stoat) may be intended to symbolize purity, despite the fact that the subject of the painting is believed to be the 16-year-old mistress of Leonardo’s employer.

Go Daddy’s 60-day transfer lock can now be removed

One of Go Daddy’s most unpopular practices – the infamous 60-day domain name transfer lock – has essentially come to an end.
From today, customers will be able to unlock their domains before the period is up, by contacting a special support team, according to director of policy planning James Bladel.
For many years Go Daddy has blocked domains from being transferred to other registrars if changes have been made to the registrant contact information within the last 60 days.
The company alerts users to the lock before they make changes to their Whois data, but that hasn’t stopped the policy bugging the hell out of domainers and regular registrants.
It’s designed to prevent domain hijackings – something Go Daddy says it does very well – but when false positives occur it often looks like a nefarious customer retention strategy.
“It’s a very effective tool for preventing harm, but it does catch out a lot of folks who want to legitimately change registrant data,” Bladel said.
Under the new policy, if Go Daddy blocks a transfer because of the 60-day lock, registrants will be given an email address to contact in order to appeal the block.
According to Bladel, after a human review the locks will be lifted and the Whois data will revert to its original state, unless the Go Daddy support team suspects a hijacking is in progress.
“The bad guys are not going to call and ask us to take a second look at this,” he said. “The bad guys want it to happen under the radar.”
The changes come thanks largely to a new revision of ICANN’s Inter-Registrar Transfer Policy, which came into effect today and specifies that transferring registrants need to be given a way to remove the locks on their domains within five days.
But Bladel said the way the policy is written gave Go Daddy a lot of leeway in how to interpret it – it could have kept the locks in place as before – but it decided to revise its policy to improve the customer experience.

As new gTLDs enter a new phase, the first wave of announcements crashes

Go Daddy, Web.com and the Public Interest Registry were among the first to reveal their new generic top-level domain plans as ICANN’s new gTLD program enters the “reveal” phase.
Announcements from several companies were timed to closely coincide with the closure of ICANN’s TLD Application System at a minute before midnight UTC last night.
After a false start (false end?) on April 12, and weeks of subsequent procrastination, the end of the new gTLD application window seems to have gone off without a hitch.
We’re now entering a new phase of the program, one which is expected to hold far fewer secrets.
Between now and the official Big Reveal, currently targeted for June 13, I’m expecting a deluge of announcements from new gTLD applicants, no longer scared of encouraging competitive bids.
Any company with any hope of standing out from the crowd of almost 2,000 applications needs to make its presence felt as loudly and as early as possible.
.web
The first to do so was number-three registrar Web.com, owner of Network Solutions and Register.com, which confirmed its long-expected bid for .web shortly before midnight.
It’s one of many companies with a claim to the gTLD, in what is certain to be a fiercely fought contention set.
The firm reckons, dubiously, that it has rights due to its trademark on Web.com, which I predict will be anything but a slam dunk argument when it comes to a Legal Rights Objection.
“We believe we possess the natural platform from which to successfully market the new .WEB top level domain since we are the sole owner of the Web.com trademark as issued by the U.S. Patent and Trademark office,” CEO David Brown said.
I wonder what the other 300 or so owners of web.[tld] domain names think about that.
.bank and .insurance
The Association of National Bankers and the Financial Services Roundtable, both US trade groups for the banking industry, provided the first post-TAS announcement to hit my inbox, at 0006 UTC.
The groups have confirmed their joint bids for .bank and .insurance, having wisely decided against the less SEO-friendly, less intuitive .banking, .invest, .investment, and .insure.
These proposed gTLDs will be secured and restricted, but they still face the substantial risk of objections from European banking regulators.
There’s also one other unconfirmed .bank applicant.
.home and .casa
Go Daddy has also revealed its two applications, giving the scoop to Domain Name Wire. It’s applied for .home and the Spanish translation, .casa, in addition to the previously announced .godaddy.
While they look benign on the face of it, I’m expecting .home to face opposition on technical grounds.
It’s on DI PRO’s list of frequently requested invalid TLDs, due to the amount of traffic it already gets from misconfigured routers.
Go Daddy may also face competition scrutiny if it wants to act as a registry and registrar, given its overwhelming dominance of the registrar market.
Both applications are also likely to find themselves in contention sets.
.ngo and .ong
The Public Interest Registry cleverly got its .ngo and .ong bids some big-readership attention a few hours ago by letting Mashable think it was getting a scoop. Ahem.
To be fair, the .ong application – a translation of .ngo for Spanish, French and Italian markets – was news. Both will target non-governmental organizations, of which there are millions.
The .ong bid stands a reasonable chance of being challenged due to its visual similarity with .org – which PIR already manages – but ICANN’s similarity tool only gives it a score of 63%.
.cloud and .global
Finally this morning, CloudNames announced applications for .cloud and .global, two unrestricted gTLDs being pitched explicitly as alternatives to .com, .biz and .info.
“A .cloud domain will allow businesses and individuals to have their own cloud on the Internet. Likewise, a .global domain will allow businesses to secure a position on an international level,” CEO Rolf Larsen said in a statement.
They’re the first examples of both strings to be announced, but CloudNames expects them both to be contested. I suspect the buzzy .cloud will be the harder to obtain.

Go Daddy applying for three new gTLDs

Go Daddy reportedly plans to apply for three new generic top-level domains, including the dot-brand .godaddy.
CEO Warren Adelman confirmed the bids to CNet’s Paul Sloan today.
The other two strings were not revealed, presumably because they could still be contested.
Yesterday, Demand Media, owner of Go Daddy’s primary registrar competitor eNom, revealed an $18 million investment in the new gTLD program, suggesting it has more ambitious plans.
Like Demand, Go Daddy subsidiaries have a history of adverse UDRP decisions, which could complicate the background checks ICANN plans to conduct on all applicants.

.me beating .co in start-ups?

The .co top-level domain may have more registrations, but more tech start-ups are opting for .me domain names, according to an informal study.
Doctoral student Thomas Park compiled a list of 1,000 start-ups added to TechCrunch’s CrunchBase database last year and found that entrepreneurs chose .co 1% of the time, versus 1.7% for .me.
As caveats, the difference between the two TLDs only works out to seven companies and .me, which launched in 2008, does of course have a two-year head start over .co.
I’m also guessing that CrunchBase has an English-language bias, which could skew the results. While .co has meaning in more countries it lacks the call-to-action punch of .me in English.
Nevertheless, I think the results are interesting because .CO Internet heavily targets start-ups in its marketing and currently has twice as many domains under management (over 1.1 million) as doMEn, the Afilias/Go Daddy joint-venture .me registry.
Park’s results show that .me had a 0.50% share in 2010 and a 0.80% share in 2009 while .co managed to get one company (0.10%) on the list during the half of 2010 it was live.
The survey found that .com is the runaway first choice for entrepreneurs, with about 85% of the start-up market, but you knew that already.

End in sight for Go Daddy’s 60-day transfer lock

Go Daddy’s unpopular 60-day domain name lockdown period, which prevents customers moving to other registrars, could be reduced to as little as five days under new ICANN policy.
ICANN’s GNSO Council this week voted to amend the Inter-Registrar Transfer Policy, which is binding on all registrars, to clarify when and how a registrar is allowed to block a transfer.
Today, Go Daddy has a policy of preventing transfers for 60 days whenever the registrant’s name is changed in the Whois record.
It’s designed to help prevent domain name hijacking, but to many customers it’s frustrating and looks shady; as a result it’s one of the most frequently cited criticisms of the company.
Other registrars may have similar policies, but Go Daddy is the only one you ever really hear complaints about.
Some have even posited that the practice violates the IRTP, which explicitly prevents registrars spuriously locking domains when customers update their Whois.
But ICANN’s compliance department has disagreed with that interpretation, drawing a distinction between “Whois changes” (cannot block a transfer) and “registrant changes” (can block a transfer).
Essentially, if you change your name in a Whois record the domain can be locked by your registrar, but if you change other fields such as mailing address or phone number it cannot.
Go Daddy and other registrars would still be able prevent transfers under the revised policy, but they would have to remove the block within five days of a customer request.
This is how ICANN explains the changes:

Registrar may only impose a lock that would prohibit transfer of the domain name if it includes in its registration agreement the terms and conditions for imposing such lock and obtains express consent from the Registered Name Holder: and
Registrar must remove the “Registrar Lock” status within five (5) calendar days of the Registered Name Holder’s initial request, if the Registrar does not provide facilities for the Registered Name Holder to remove the “Registrar Lock” status

Registrars may have some freedom in how they implement the new policy. Unblocking could be as simple as checking a box in the user interface, or it could mean a phone call.
Go Daddy, which was an active participant in the IRTP review and says it supports the changes, supplied a statement from director of policy planning James Bladel:

In the coming months, Go Daddy is making a few changes to our policy for domains in which the registrant information has changed.
We believe this new procedure will continue to prevent hijacked domain names from being transferred away, while making the transfer experience more user-friendly for our customers.

The changes were approved unanimously by the GNSO Council at its meeting on Thursday.
Before they become binding on registrars, they will have to be approved by the ICANN board of directors too, and the soonest that could happen is at its February 16 meeting.
The changes are part of a package of IRTP revisions – more to come in the near future – that have been under discussion in the ICANN community since 2007. Seriously.

Tiny start-up secures .bank gTLD trademark

A likely new gTLD applicant has secured a US trademark on the term “.bank”.
Asif LLC, a Wisconsin start-up with an undisclosed number of employees, won approval for the trademark 4,085,335 on Tuesday, for use in “domain name registration services”.
(UPDATE: Asif actually does business now as Domain Security Company LLC, but the trademark application was filed under its former name.)
As Domain Name Wire reported last year, Asif became a Go Daddy reseller in order to provide the US Patent & Trademark Office with proof it was using the brand.
It appears the gambit was successful, and the company now has a card to play in its inevitable battle with other .bank applicants, such as the BITS/American Bankers Association project.
Mary Iqbal, Asif’s CEO, told DomainIncite today that the company also has a trademark pending in Pakistan, where it has existing business connections.
Iqbal says she’s serious about her .bank application. It’s an idea she’s been working on for a few years.
Asif has been talking to security companies about providing the security infrastructure for the gTLD and has already signed up with a registry back-end provider, she said.
All she was prepared to disclose at the moment is that one of these partners has “ground-breaking encryption technology” and that the company has solid plans for its security profile.
The .bank gTLD would of course be limited to manually verified financial institutions, Iqbal confirmed.
Explaining the reseller site used to get the trademark, Iqbal said: “We intend to use that in future to sell .bank domain names but for now we’re selling names in other TLDs.”
Asif also has a pending US trademark on “.secure”, which it also plans to apply for as a gTLD.
Iqbal said that the company plans to offer small and medium sized e-commerce businesses extra security services if they redirect their customers to their .secure domain at the checkout.
While I am unaware of any other public .secure applicants, the .bank gTLD is expected to be contested.
A joint project of the American Bankers Association and BITS, part of the Financial Services Roundtable, has already essentially confirmed that it plans to apply for .bank and possibly two other financial gTLDs, using Verisign as its back-end.
“We don’t know for sure if they’re going to apply for .bank,” Iqbal said, however. “If somebody else does apply, all I can say that we are the legal rights holder for .bank.”
Holding a trademark on a term gives companies the right to file a Legal Rights Objection against new gTLD applicants.
However, as much as I love an entrepreneur, I estimate the chances of Asif getting its .bank application approved at roughly zero, trademark or not.
There are about half a dozen different reasons Asif would probably not pass the Legal Rights Objection test, which would leave it in a contention set with other .bank applicants.
The final mechanism offered by ICANN to resolve contested gTLDs is an auction, and nobody goes into an auction against the American Bankers Association expecting to win.
ICANN also encourages applicants in contention sets to talk it out amongst themselves before resorting to auction. If Asif is lucky, a rival .bank applicant will pay it to go away before the string goes to auction.
If it’s very lucky, somebody will acquire the trademark before the company – which Iqbal said is already funded but would welcome additional investment – splashes out $185,000 on its application fee.
The Asif .bank application also stands a substantial chance of being objected to by governments.
ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee, and in particular the influential US representative, has very strong views on gTLDs purporting to represent regulated industries.
If the GAC is faced with a choice between a .bank backed by the ABA and BITS with a Verisign back-end, and one backed by a tiny Wisconsin start-up, I believe there’s a pretty good chance the Wisconsin start-up is going to find itself on the receiving end of a GAC Advice objection.
Just a hunch.

Go Daddy gripe site relaunches with .co domain

Erstwhile Go Daddy gripe site No Daddy, formerly found at nodaddy.com, has been relaunched under new ownership at nodaddy.co.
The original site opened in 2007 as a place for customers to share “horror stories”, but was acquired by Go Daddy last July at around the same time it secured a reported $2.2 billion investment.
It’s still not entirely clear whether Go Daddy paid off the previous owners, or whether it was legal or other threats that caused the nodaddy.com domain to change hands.
The site once ranked second only to Go Daddy itself in Google search results for the company’s name.
The new site, NoDaddy.co, is unaffiliated with the previous owners.
The owner identifies himself as “AdverseVariable” and the domain is registered using a Whois privacy service offered by Bahamas-based registrar Internet.bs.
The new forum currently only has one post.