Go Daddy eats humble pie after SOPA boycott

Go Daddy lost tens of thousands of domain name registrations totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost recurring revenue due to yesterday’s SOPA-related boycott.
NameCheap, the eNom reseller that spearheaded the campaign against Go Daddy, said on Twitter that it had raised over $25,000 for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, suggesting that it saw over 25,000 inbound transfers using its SOPASUCKS discount code.
Twitter noise also suggests that several other registrars, such as Name.com and Gandi, gained from the protest.
The boycott went ahead due to Go Daddy’s former support of the Stop Online Piracy Act, which many Americans believe will infringe civil liberties by erecting a great big DNS firewall around the country.
The company withdrew its support for the bill before Christmas, but many customers either chose to ignore its new stance or to point out that “not supporting” did not necessarily mean “opposing”.
Frankly, I think many people just wanted to lash out, and withdrawing business from a company with an established reputation for being a bit downmarket is a lot easier than, say, turning off SOPA-supporting ESPN or cutting up your SOPA-supporting Visa card.
Warren Adelman, Go Daddy’s new CEO, issued this statement last night, clarifying the company’s position:

We have observed a spike in domain name transfers, which are running above normal rates and which we attribute to Go Daddy’s prior support for SOPA, which was reversed.
Go Daddy opposes SOPA because the legislation has not fulfilled its basic requirement to build a consensus among stake-holders in the technology and Internet communities. Our company regrets the loss of any of our customers, who remain our highest priority, and we hope to repair those relationships and win back their business over time.

The company has over 50 million domains under management. Even if 50,000 were transferred to other registrars, that’s still only 0.1% of Go Daddy’s installed base.
Name server records compiled by DailyChanges also heavily suggest that the company sold over 43,000 new domain registrations yesterday.
The fact that Adelman chose to eat humble pie rather than pointing this out was probably a wise PR decision.
Also, NameCheap deserves some kudos for running a very effective social media campaign.

Let’s all beat up Go Daddy!

I think it’s fair to say that Go Daddy is ending 2011 on a bum note.
A handful of competitors, notably Namecheap, are exploiting the recent outrage about the company’s support for the Stop Online Piracy Act (since recanted) to really stick the boot in.
NameCheap today called for December 29 to be marked as Move Your Domain Day and is currently sponsoring the hashtag #BoycottGoDaddy on Twitter.
It also said it will donate $1 to the Electronic Frontier Foundation for every domain transferred to it that day using the coupon code SOPASUCKS.
Other registrars are joining in with somewhat less gusto.
Dotster, for example, is offering cheap transfers with the discount code NOFLIPFLOP, a reference to Go Daddy’s changed position on SOPA.
So what’s the net effect of all this on Go Daddy’s business? It’s difficult to tell with much accuracy at this point.
NameCheap claims to have seen 40,000 inbound transfers in the last week, most of them presumably coming from former Go Daddy customers.
That’s going to be a difficult claim to verify however, even when December’s official gTLD registry reports are published a few months from now.
Unlike most ICANN-accredited registrars, NameCheap does not register domains directly — it has fewer than 200 .com domains under management, according to the most recent registry report.
The company started off life as an eNom reseller and appears to have never gotten around to migrating its customers.
(I wonder how many people transferring their domains this week are aware that some of their fees are probably flowing into the coffers of Demand Media, another popular internet hate figure.)
Several media articles have sourced DomainTool’s DailyChanges service for numbers of transfers out of domaincontrol.com, Go Daddy’s default name server constellation.
But as Andrew Allemann and Elliot Silver have already noted, those numbers are not a reliable indication of how many domains are being transferred from Go Daddy to other registrars.
Here’s a graph showing the transfers in and out of domaincontrol.com since the start of the month.

Transfers out briefly overtook transfers in this week, but by a negligible number.
The two big spikes you can see – both of which occur before the boycott began on December 22 – can be attributed to domainers (possibly a single domainer) moving thousands of domains from domaincontrol.com to internettraffic.com, a parking service, and back again.
Those movements had nothing to do with SOPA or the boycott, nor do they indicate that the domains were transferred away from Go Daddy. Name server changes != transfers.
Facts shouldn’t get in the way of a good story, however.
That’s probably why NameCheap seems to have got away with its insinuations about Go Daddy “blocking” transfers yesterday, which turned out to be highly questionable.
It transpires that transfers into NameCheap were failing not because of any nefarious activity by Go Daddy, but because NameCheap’s Whois queries were being automatically rate limited.
This was likely because NameCheap failed to white-list the IP addresses it uses for port 43 Whois look-ups either using ICANN’s RADAR tool or by notifying Go Daddy directly.
Registrar expert Jothan Frakes said as much on this blog yesterday, as did Michele Neylon of the unrelated registrar Blacknight on Twitter.
Go Daddy senior direct of product development Rich Merdinger suggested in a statement last night that NameCheap looked for the PR opportunity before picking up the phone:

Namecheap posted their accusations in a blog, but to the best our of knowledge, has yet to contact Go Daddy directly, which would be common practice for situations like this. Normally, the fellow registrar would make a request for us to remove the normal rate limiting block which is a standard practice used by Go Daddy, and many other registrars, to rate limit Whois queries to combat WhoIs abuse.

NameCheap has naturally disputed this interpretation of events, saying it had tried to get in touch with Go Daddy but received no response for 24 hours (Christmas Day, presumably).
Regardless of the he said/she said, the narrative in the media and on Twitter for the last couple of days has been pretty clear — Go Daddy: Bad, NameCheap: Good.
The SOPA story seems to have hit a nerve, and there are no shortage of pissed-off Go Daddy customers with horror stories to recount or just general criticisms of the company’s fairly brash image.
Warren Adelman picked a hell of a time to take over as CEO.

Whois throttling returns to bite Go Daddy on the ass

Go Daddy has been accused by a competitor of “thwarting” domain name transfers in violation of ICANN rules. (Note: story has been updated, see below).
The problem has reared its head due to the ongoing SOPA-related boycott of the company’s services, and appears to be related to Go Daddy’s decision earlier this year to throttle Whois queries.
NameCheap, one of the registrars that has been offering discounts to Go Daddy customers outraged by its recently recanted support of the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act, blogged today:

As many customers have recently complained of transfer issues, we suspect that this competitor [Go Daddy] is thwarting efforts to transfer domains away from them.
Specifically, GoDaddy appears to be returning incomplete WHOIS information to Namecheap, delaying the transfer process. This practice is against ICANN rules.
We at Namecheap believe that this action speaks volumes about the impact that informed customers are having on GoDaddy’s business.
It’s a shame that GoDaddy feels they have to block their (former) customers from voting with their dollars. We can only guess that at GoDaddy, desperate times call for desperate measures.

Part of transferring a domain from Go Daddy to NameCheap involves checking the identity of the registrant against Whois records.
Judging by a number of complaints made by Reddit readers today, it appears that NameCheap and other registrars are attempting to automatically query Go Daddy’s Whois database on port 43 at sufficient volume to trigger whatever throttling algorithm Go Daddy has in place to prevent the “harvesting” of contact data.
Go Daddy caused a similar ruckus earlier this year when it started blocking DomainTools and other Whois aggregation services from collecting full Whois records.
The registrar giant claimed then that it was trying to protect its customers by preventing the inappropriate use of their contact data.
However, while blocking a third-party information tool is merely annoying and disturbing, interfering with legitimate inter-registrar transfers could get Go Daddy into hot water, even if it is inadvertent.
NameCheap says it is doing the required Whois look-ups manually for now, and that it will honor each transfer request.
Giving Go Daddy the benefit of the doubt, I assume that this problem is ongoing largely due to the Christmas holiday, and that it will be rectified as soon as the appropriate people become aware of it.
Add this to your list of reasons .com and .net need a thick Whois.
UPDATE: All registrars have access to an ICANN service called RADAR, which enables them to specify the IP addresses they use to query competitors’ Whois databases.
Whitelisting IP addresses in this way could prevent a registrar’s queries being throttled, but not all registrars use the service.
According to this screenshot, NameCheap has not whitelisted any IP addresses in RADAR, which may be the reason it is having problems transferring Go Daddy customers’ domains to itself.

Go Daddy to advertise .co at the Super Bowl

Go Daddy plans to advertise .co domain names during the Super Bowl broadcast for the second year in a row.
The company has bought two 30-second slots during the show, one of which will plug .co and will feature celebrity spokesmodels Danica Patrick and Jillian Michaels.
Scripts for both ads have been approved by NBC censors already, Go Daddy said.
It will be the eighth consecutive year the company has advertised during the inexplicably popular sporting event, which had a record-breaking 111 million US viewers this February.
The 2011 ad revealed Joan Rivers, her head spliced onto the body of a much younger glamor model, as the .co Go Daddy Girl.
I estimated at the time that .CO Internet took roughly 30,000 to 50,000 extra registrations due to the Super Bowl commercial.

Go Daddy bans DNS harvesting

Go Daddy is blocking companies from harvesting its DNS records, the company has confirmed.
CTO Dave Koopman denied that Go Daddy has a “DNS Blackouts” policy, but confirmed that it has banned certain IP addresses from doing DNS queries for its customers’ domains. He wrote:

The rumor about “DNS Blackouts” was started by someone using Go Daddy servers to cache all Go Daddy DNS records on his personal servers for financial gain.
Back to our previous example of 100 queries a day. Instead of one person accessing 100 domain names, this individual was attempting to download tens of millions of Go Daddy DNS records – twice daily. While his behavior did not cause any system issues, we felt it best to revoke access to the offending IPs.
If Go Daddy finds unwanted activity in our network, Go Daddy takes actions to stop it.

That appears to be a reference to a blog post from DNSstuff.com founder R Scott Perry, who complained in early September about what he called a “Selective DNS Blackouts” policy.
Perry suggested that Go Daddy was trying to drum up interest in its Premium DNS service by providing poor DNS service to regular customers.
Blocking DNS queries from selected IP addresses draws to mind Go Daddy’s policy of banning DomainTools and other companies from harvesting Whois records in bulk.
In January, the company confirmed, that it was blocking commercial Whois aggregators including DomainTools. The ban appears to still be in affect for non-paying DomainTools users.
Like DomainTools, DNSstuff.com offers DNS monitoring and alerts for premium fees.

Rumor mill: three stories we expect to write soon

File these rumors under: unconfirmed, but plausible.
Sometimes the gossip is impossible to confirm to the extent that I’m comfortable reporting it as fact, but interesting enough that I think it could use a wider airing.
Here are three examples of Stuff We’ve Heard Recently. Take it all with a great big pinch of salt.
Go Daddy to become a registry
The world’s largest registrar is poised to make an entrance into the registry market, it is whispered.
The rumors don’t go as far as to whether the company plans to apply for some new gTLDs itself, or whether it plans to become a back-end registry services provider, or something else.
But if ICANN’s new relaxed stance on vertical separation means its competitors plan to join the registry space, it seems likely that Go Daddy will want a piece of the action too.
It is already a joint-venture partner in .me registry Domen, though I believe Afilias is responsible for the technical heavy lifting at the back end.
It’s too early to speculate too much, but I’ve written before that Go Daddy is possibly the only registrar likely to catch the attention of competition watchdogs if it decides to vertically integrate.
The official word from Go Daddy when I asked for confirmation a few weeks ago was: “We have no comment and we have no formal announcement pending.”
.pro to be liberalized
Multiple sources say that the restricted .pro gTLD, which has been around but seriously under-used since 2004, is set to begin to undergo a significant liberalization soon.
I’m expecting to see operator RegistryPro, which is now owned by HostWay, file a Registry Services Evaluation Process request with ICANN in the next few weeks.
Details are sketchy, but I would not be surprised if the company says it wants to do away with its restrictive registration policy entirely.
Currently, registrants have to provide evidence of professional credentials if they want to register a .pro name, although there’s a huge loophole that allows registrations via credentialed proxies.
RegistryPro hired itself a new CEO, Karim Jiwani, in May, and it’s been broadly predicted that he plans to shake up .pro to make it more of a commercial success.
Its parent may have already put in some of the groundwork for a .jobs-style directory service – HostWay, via a shell company, registered over 40,000 US zip codes in .pro in August 2010.
MarkMonitor gets acquired
This is more speculation than rumor.
There’s a wave of M&A activity in the domain name industry, as companies prepare for introduction of new gTLDs, and one of the potential growth areas is brand management.
With hundreds of new gTLDs likely to launch over a relatively short space of time, companies such as MarkMonitor could find their services in more demand than ever.
Whenever I ask anyone which registrars they think are likely to be hit by the consolidation bug, MarkMonitor is always on the shortlist.
The private company is backed by venture capitalists which will no doubt be looking to execute an exit strategy sooner or later, but the list of potential buyers is quite small.
Consider it a hunch, for now.

Domain Registry of America still slamming, still scamming

Domain name slamming is alive and well in the ICANN-accredited registrar community.
I’ve just received a letter in the mail offering me the chance to transfer and renew domainincite.com for the knock-down price of £25 ($38) a year.
It’s Domain Registry of America again, still slamming almost a decade after it was first sued for the completely unethical practice of conning people into transferring their domain names.
The letter looks like a renewal notice. Besides ostensibly coming from “Domain Renewal Group”, it also contains the prominent text “Domain Name Renewal Service”.
Domain Renewal Group and Domain Registry of America are one and the same – fronts for the ICANN-accredited registrar Brandon Gray Internet Services Inc, dba NameJuice.com.
The letter, as you can see from the scan, is a little less bogus than the ones DROA started sending out back in 2001. The text states now much more clearly that “this is not a bill”.
But domain slamming has always relied upon people not reading the letter properly and/or not understanding the intricacies of domain transfers, and this is no different.
DROA’s business depends upon its letters finding their way into the hands of gullible individual registrants or accounting departments that will blindly pay official-looking notices.
At the prices the company charges – pretty much the most expensive in the industry – very few people will have transferred their domains because they thought they were getting a good deal.
There have been numerous complaints and lawsuits against DROA over the last decade.
In November 2009, the UK Advertising Standards Agency found DROA in breach of truthfulness and honesty guidelines for a substantially similar mailshot and ruled:

The mailing must not appear again in its current form.

And last year, the .ca registry CIRA terminated Domain Registry of Canada, another Brandon Gray front, for slamming .ca registrants using the same methods.
So isn’t it about time ICANN shut these muppets down too?
Unfortunately, ICANN can only use contracts to enforce compliance, and I’m not sure there are any sticks in the 2001 Registrar Accreditation Agreement that it can use to beat them.
DROA has plainly breached Go Daddy’s Whois access policy by slamming me (the letter was sent to my Whois billing address, not my actual residence), but I don’t think there’s much Go Daddy can do about that short of suing.
As far as I can tell, Brandon Gray, which has about 130,000 domains under management, got its ICANN accreditation in about 2003. It was previously an eNom reseller.
So its accreditation is probably going to be up for renewal within the next couple of years.
Fortunately, ICANN has just this week introduced stricter new accreditation application rules that are specifically designed to weed out the scumbags.
Any company or individual with a track record of dishonesty is no longer welcome at ICANN.
So if there’s nothing that can be done before then, at the very least when Brandon Gray’s accreditation expires ICANN should not renew it.
What’s more, other registrars should lean on ICANN to make sure Brandon Gray is shown the door. It’s been bringing their industry into disrepute for the best part of a decade and it’s time for it to stop.

WordPress.com’s registrar service: Slow cookin’ makes good eatin’

WordPress.com provider Automattic has not abandoned its plans to start offering domain names directly to its users, according to its lead developer.
It’s been about 11 months since the company received its ICANN accreditation, but it is currently still acting as a Go Daddy reseller.
“Our registry product is still under development,” Automattic founder and chief barbecue taste tester (really) Matt Mullenweg said in an email. “Slow cookin’ makes good eatin’.”
WordPress.com announced last week that it would start offering .me domains, alongside .com, .org, and .net, saying it would give users a better chance to get a domain they liked.
The .me registry, Domen, is a joint venture whose partners include Go Daddy and Afilias.
“GoDaddy is a valued partner and we continue to use many of their services as part of our business,” Mullenweg added.
Domain names are WordPress.com’s best-selling add-on product. According to DomainTools, over 226,000 domains are hosted on the same servers as WordPress.com.

NBT agrees to $236m buy-out

Following in the footsteps of larger rival Go Daddy, the UK-based registrar Group NBT has agreed to be bought out by private investors for £153 million ($236m).
NBT owns registrars including NetNames, Ascio and Indom.
The all-cash offer comes from investors led by HgCapital and represents a 22.5% premium on the company’s closing share price yesterday.
At 550p a share, the offer stands to make a profit for anybody who has bought NBT shares in the last ten years, according to the company.
The news came as NBT reported an annual profit, excluding certain items, up organically 9% at £8.9 million ($13.8m) on revenue that was up 4% at £45.7 million ($70.6m).
Including the results from French registrar Indom, which the company acquired last December, profit was up 18% at £9.6 million ($14.8m) on revenue up 13% to £49.5 million ($76.5m)
The NBT deal is merely the latest in a series of buyouts and mergers to hit the registrar market this year.
As well as Go Daddy’s $2 billion+ change of control, Network Solutions recently sold out to Web.com for $561 million in cash and stock, and Tucows acquired EPAG Domainservices for $2.5 million.
At least one city analyst thinks the buyout timing relates to ICANN’s forthcoming new generic top-level domains program, and is bullish on Top Level Domain Holdings shares as a result.
Will the wave of consolidation continue? Who’s next?

Bob Parsons worth $1.5bn, ranked 293 on Forbes 400

Go Daddy executive chairman Bob Parsons is the 293rd wealthiest person in America, with a self-made fortune of $1.5 billion, according to the latest Forbes 400 rich list.
In its annual league table, published yesterday, Forbes ranks Parsons tied with tech investors such as LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and Groupon co-founder Evan Lefkofsky.
Parsons, Go Daddy’s founder and erstwhile CEO, is a debutant on the list following his sale of a majority stake in the company to a group of institutional investors.
KKR, Silver Lake and Technology Crossover Ventures collectively bought out more than half of Go Daddy in a deal announced in July, reportedly worth north of $2 billion.