Go Daddy’s 60-day domain lockdown loophole

Perhaps the most common complaint of the many leveled at Go Daddy over the years is that it refuses to allow customers to transfer domains to another registrar for 60 days after an ownership change.
The latest person to fire this criticism at the company is tech blogger Scott Raymond, who published a lengthy tirade against Go Daddy and its policy on ZDNet today.
Raymond points out that Go Daddy seems to be in violation of ICANN’s Inter-Registrar Transfer Policy, which explicitly prohibits the rejection of a transfer request due to a recent Whois change.
He’s not alone. Even Andrew Allemann of Domain Name Wire, hardly Go Daddy’s fiercest critic, said as recently as May that he thinks the company is in violation of the IRTP.
With good reason – this April 2008 ICANN advisory seemed to be specifically written with a ban on Go Daddy’s 60-day policy in mind.
But is the company non-compliant? ICANN doesn’t seem to think so.
I’ve tracked down this November 2009 email from David Giza, then ICANN’s head of compliance, in which he describes what seems to amount to a loophole Go Daddy and other registrars exploit.
Giza explains that the 2008 advisory “only addresses mandatory updates to Whois contact information, not a transfer or assignment to a new registrant”.
Registrants are obliged to keep their Whois data up-to-date; that’s what he means by “mandatory”.
Giza’s email adds:

the transfer policy does not prohibit registrars from requiring registrants to agree to the blocking of transfer requests as a condition for registrar facilitation of optional services such as the transfer of a registration to a new registrant.
We understand GoDaddy.com’s 60-day lock is a voluntary opt-in process where registrants are made aware of and agree to the restriction that the domain name is not to be transferred for 60-days following the completion of transfer. As such, this practice is not prohibited by the transfer policy.

In other words, there are “Whois Changes” and there are “Registrant Changes”, and registrars are only allowed to trigger a lock-down in the latter case, according to Giza.
And according to DNW’s reporting on the subject, that’s exactly what Go Daddy continues to do — locking the domain if certain fields in the registrant record are changed.
So the 60-day lock appears to be kosher, at least in the opinion of ICANN’s erstwhile compliance chief. Whether that could change under the department’s new management is unknown.
As it happens, the subject was raised by a recent working group that was looking into revising the IRTP, but it was so contentious that consensus could not be found.
The problem has been bounced down the road. The most recent mention came in this ICANN issue report (pdf, page 14-15).
Anyway, if I lost you several paragraphs ago, the net result of all this seems to be that Go Daddy probably isn’t breaking the rules, but that nobody can agree whether that’s a good thing or not.
The fact that one has to do this much digging into ICANN esoterica just to figure out whether Go Daddy is screwing its customers over isn’t very reassuring, is it?

Go Daddy confirms .xxx pricing, will host porn sites

Go Daddy has revealed its pricing scheme for .xxx domain names and confirmed that it will indeed host the porn sites that use them.
When .xxx goes into general availability in December, Go Daddy will charge $100 per name per year.
That’s surprisingly high – a $40 markup on the $60 ICM Registry fee – for a registrar generally known for its reasonable prices.
I know of at least two registrars planning to sell .xxx more cheaply – the UK’s DomainMonster ($75 if bought in bulk) and Spain’s DinaHosting ($67). There may be others I haven’t come across yet.
Sunrise period pricing at Go Daddy is $210 for applications from the adult entertainment industry and $200 for trademark holders from outside the industry. Landrush prices will be $200 too.
Those fees represent some of the better deals I’ve seen for .xxx’s pre-launch phases.
The prices have not yet been published on the Go Daddy web site, but a company spokesperson confirmed that some of its larger customers have been privately notified.
That apparently includes Mike Berkens, who broke the news last week.
Go Daddy also confirmed that it will host .xxx porn sites, though only on its paid-for hosting accounts.
I’ve always been a little confused by Go Daddy’s hosting terms of service. By my reading, porn was outright banned. Apparently I was dead wrong.
The company’s general counsel, Christine Jones, said in a statement:

Go Daddy’s Web hosting agreement does not currently prohibit pornography, except in the case of ad-supported hosting. Those terms will continue for all TLDs, including .xxx, unless otherwise prohibited by our agreements with the various registry operators.

I know I’m not the only person out there who was confused by the ToS, but I can’t think of a better person to clarify the situation than the company’s top lawyer.

Together at last: NetSol merges with Register.com

The first-ever .com domain name registrar and its first-ever competitor are to merge as part of Web.com’s strategy to scale up and better compete with Go Daddy.
Web.com, which bought Register.com a little over a year ago, has now turned its attention to bigger fish. It’s agreed to buy Network Solutions for $561 million in cash and stock.
The combined company will have three million customers, revenue of over $450 million, and over nine million domains under management.
By my reckoning, this means Web.com becomes the fourth-largest registrar by domain count, a position already held by NetSol, a couple of million domains behind Tucows.
NetSol was of course the original .com registrar/registry and Register.com was the first competitor to start selling domains after ICANN introduced competition to the market.
Both registrars were briefly public companies in their own right, before being re-privatized around the same time it became apparent Go Daddy and the other discount registrars were eating their lunch.
This shared history is still evident today – both companies still sell domain names for 1999 prices, and they’re both still losing customers as a result.
CEO David Brown said on a conference call announcing the deal that Register.com is currently losing 13,000 subscribers, net, per quarter.
This is not as bad as the 20,000 per quarter at the time of the acquisition, but it’s still over 140 customers jumping ship, on average, every day.
Brown said that NetSol’s churn is similar; its customer base is “declining very slowly”, albeit from a stronger starting position.
When VeriSign sold NetSol in 2003, it said the unit had about four million customers. Today, according to Web.com’s announcement, it’s closer to two million.
The NetSol deal will enable Web.com to expand its focus from small businesses, Register.com’s core market, to medium-sized businesses too, Brown said.
“This is a unique chance for Web.com to quickly gain major scale in our sweet spot – the small and mid-size business market,” he told analysts.
The larger scale will also enable the company to ramp up its marketing efforts, he said, helping it to gain mindshare from “another company” (cough–Go Daddy–cough).
Both the NetSol and Register.com brands will stay, but the primary brand in its advertising campaigns will be Web.com
Both NetSol and Register.com still operate at very much the high-end of the pricing spectrum, having stubbornly resisted pricing pressures for the last decade.
Register.com currently sells .com domain names for $38 a year, NetSol sells them for $35.
However, on the analysts’ call, Brown discussed the success of a recent marketing campaign at Register.com, which offered domains at cheaper prices than usual.
“We discovered marketing a lower-price domain name was driving a total order value that was more than ten times higher due to additional offerings,” he said.
I wonder where they got that idea from.

Go Daddy and Joan Rivers win .CO awards

The .co registry .CO Internet has announced the winners of its inaugural Bulby Awards, given out to the best .co sites.
Key registrar partner Go Daddy won an award (for x.co), as did the companies’ joint Super Bowl spokesmodel Joan Rivers (for joan.co).
Go Daddy’s Bulby was for the Best Use Of A Single Letter Domain. It beat Twitter (t.co) and Overstock (o.co). Rivers beat the singer Charlotte Church for Best Personal Site.
Sociable.co beat domain blogger Elliot Silver (bahamas.co) to the Best Content award.
The winners were tallied up from votes submitted online, .CO said. The results can be found here.
Afilias does something similar for .info domains every year, but its awards have cash prizes.

Go Daddy dominant in .co domains

Go Daddy is responsible for more than one third of all .co domain name registrations, according to new research from HosterStats.
HosterStats has managed to track down 616,227 .co domains, and found in its first .co report that 32.69% of them point to domaincontrol.com, Go Daddy’s primary name server doman.
Another two Go Daddy domains, secureserver.net and cashparking.com, handle 3.89% and 3.42% of known .co domains, the report says.
The registry, .CO Internet, does not publish its zone files, so HosterStats does not have stats covering the over one million .co domains that have been registered.
Still, it’s a pretty decent sample size, and probably a reasonably reliable guide for estimating Go Daddy’s .co market share.
It’s pretty much in line with Go Daddy’s overall market share, and comes as little surprise given joint marketing initiatves such as this year’s Super Bowl commercial.
Sedo’s sedoparking.com was the second-largest .co host, with 5.21% of the names.
Tallying up percentages from name servers exclusively associated with parking services, it appears that at least 10% of .co is parked.
I suspect the real number to be much larger.

Confirmed: Go Daddy bought NoDaddy.com

Go Daddy has confirmed that it has acquired the domain name nodaddy.com, which until recently was the address of a gripe site frequented by the registrar’s biggest critics.
“Sometime in July we reached an agreement between Insecure.Com LLC and GoDaddy.com to transfer the domain name NoDaddy.com,” a Go Daddy spokesperson confirmed.
I’ve reported on the deal for The Register, here.
I should probably offer apologies to Toby Harris for disbelieving him, without doing my own checking, when he speculated that Go Daddy had bought out the site’s original owner.

Go Daddy’s Bob Parsons set for Forbes rich list

Go Daddy founder and executive chairman Bob Parsons is likely to be included on the next Forbes 400 list of wealthiest Americans, according to Forbes reporter Luisa Kroll.
Kroll estimates that Parsons will be worth at least $1.5 billion following the closure of its recent reported $2.25 billion investment with KKR, Silver Lake and Technology Crossover Partners.
That valuation would place Parsons at #269 on the current Forbes rich list.
He would rank higher than former AOL CEO Steve Case, Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, former eBay chief Meg Whitman and Yahoo’s Jerry Yang.
Parsons, whose public image is largely that of a regular guy fulfilling the American dream, reluctantly admitted that he may belong on the list, although he does not consider himself a billionaire, Kroll blogged.
“I am going to give most of the proceeds to a foundation,” Parsons reportedly said.

Shakeup at Go Daddy

Go Daddy has a new boss and new ownership following a deal reportedly worth $2.25 billion.
For the first time in its 14-year history, Bob Parsons will be neither the majority shareholder nor the CEO.
It appears that seasoned technology investment firms KKR, Silver Lake and Technology Crossover Ventures will own, between them, more than half of the domain name registrar.
Very little about the “partnership” was disclosed, including the financial terms. Various media sources valued the deal at $2.25 billion.
It was left to Domain Name Wire to uncover the news that Parsons will actually step aside as CEO to allow COO Warren Adelman to take over.
Parsons will become executive chairman.
A Go Daddy spokesperson said: “Mr. Parsons has said he will be very active in the business, especially in the areas he is most interested, such as marketing.”
She added that “very little will change”.
The spokesperson confirmed that after the deal closes Parsons will no longer be the majority shareholder. He currently owns 78% of Go Daddy, with the remaining 22% allocated to employee stock options.
As DNW reported, 36 employees will cash out for over $1 million each.
I wonder if we’ll see a mini wave of new domain name companies springing up in the Scottsdale area, as a result of newly minted Go Daddy millionaires leaving to launch their own start-ups.

Go Daddy gripe site to shut down

NoDaddy.com, a gripe site dedicated to discussing customer and employee grievances with Go Daddy, is to be shut down by its administrators.
The shutdown coincides with an ownership shakeup at the registrar, which will see Warren Adelman take over as CEO and three big new investors come on board.
NoDaddy administrator “Rohan” wrote:

What started to document the improper suspension of SecLists.Org grew to cover dozens of other GoDaddy scandals including shill bidding on their own domain auctions, improperly blocking users from transferring domains to other registrars, sexual harassment, constant objectification of women, killing elephants for promotional purposes, etc. We’re hopeful that GoDaddy’s new owners will stop these shenanigans.
While our opinions of GoDaddy haven’t changed, we (NoDaddy admins) have decided to move on to focus on our other pursuits. Accordingly, we’ll be shutting down the main site and the forums on July 8. The site had a great run, and we appreciate your participation over the last 4 years!

In recent months, the vast majority of the posts on the forum have been made by a single disgruntled former Go Daddy employee who is currently suing the company for alleged “wage theft”.
The thread about the class action rambles on to some 147 pages and over 2,100 posts, most of which were made by this individual, going by the handle EmployeeClassAction.
Unsurprisingly, this user suspects the administrators were paid off.

Go Daddy sale to make Bob Parsons a billionaire

Number one domain name registrar Go Daddy is in talks to sell out to private investors in a deal worth north of $2 billion, according to reports.
The deal, first reported by the New York Post and subsequently confirmed by other newspapers, would see the company acquired by a group led by Silver Lake Partners and KKR & Co for between $1 billion and $2.5 billion.
An official announcement could come as soon as Tuesday, these reports said.
Go Daddy has been subject of exit strategy rumors before, notably late last year, and it came to nothing, but this time it’s looking like a done deal.
The company also attempted to go public in 2006, but its IPO was yanked due to poor market conditions and other reasons.
In fact, IPOs appear to be the exception rather than the rule when it comes to domain name registrars.
Register.com did go public, but it didn’t work out too well and it was reprivatized. Network Solutions also wound up in private hands. Demand Media listed last year, but eNom is not its core business.
For many, Go Daddy is synonymous with its flamboyant chief executive, Bob Parsons, who founded the company in 1997 with the proceeds of a previous technology company sale.
As the company’s primary shareholder, the sale will likely make him a billionaire. The question is: as a serial entrepreneur, how long will Parsons stick around?
He’s a pretty good businessman, to be sure, but he’s never struck me as somebody who’s particularly passionate about the domain name industry.
I expect he’ll stick around for a while to groom his successor after the sale closes – it may even be a condition of the deal – but I’d be surprised if he’s still at the helm two years from now.
I understand there are also a number of senior Go Daddy executives with share options; we’re likely to see these guys on the receiving end of windfalls if the deal goes through.
I’ll also be interested to see how new ownership will affect Go Daddy’s philanthropic work.
The company does not like to talk about it (more than three or four times a month) but it does contribute a fair bit to charitable projects.
I don’t think new management will attempt any kind of drastic shake-up of Go Daddy’s business model, such as raising prices, in the short term.
The company has a winning formula that is not in need of fixing right now.