GoDaddy’s reason for dumping Uniregistry doesn’t make a lot of sense

GoDaddy, as you may have read, has again decided to dump Uniregistry’s portfolio of TLDs, following wholesale price increases.
But its explanation for the move — trying to provide its customers with a “great product experience” — doesn’t seem to tally with the way it has gone about implementing the change.
The company confirmed this week that it will no longer offer new registrations in Uniregistry’s stable of new gTLDs, but will continue to support existing customers.
The registrar’s EVP of domains, Mike McLaughlin, reportedly explained the move like this:

GoDaddy strives to provide its customers with great product experiences wherever possible. After careful consideration, we decided to stop offering new Uniregistry domain names for sale because their pricing changes caused frustration and uncertainty with our customers.

But the way GoDaddy has gone about this looks like it is set to provide anything other than a great product experience.
For starters, existing registrants of Uniregistry names will find their registrations migrated over to the wholesale registrar Hexonet, for which GoDaddy will act as reseller.
They’ll still be able to manage their names via their GoDaddy control panels, but technically GoDaddy will no longer be the registrar.
This could well add friction to the customer support process, as well as meaning Hexonet will now show up in Whois as the sponsoring registrar.
Accompanying this move is the unexplained removal of Whois privacy services for all affected domains. Registrants will get a refund for their privacy service and will have the opportunity to switch registrars to one that will support privacy.
For those that remain, suddenly their personally identifiable information will become publicly available. This could lead to an increase in complaints and support calls as registrants realize what has happened.
In terms of price, existing registrants will presumably still be affected by Uniregistry’s increases to the same extent as they were previously. Again, their customer experience has not changed.
Overall, the explanation doesn’t make a heck of a lot of sense to me. I put the above points to GoDaddy and VP of domains Rich Merdinger responded, via a company spokesperson:

After we made the decision to stop supporting Uniregistry domain names, we worked to provide the best possible experience we could to our customers. We wanted them to have a transparent experience. They will log in to the same GoDaddy account and service the domain names the same way they always have. Because of the transfer of the name to a different registrar, privacy had to be removed. While this impacts a small subset of these customers, we have done everything to make this transition as smooth as possible.

It’s true that GoDaddy isn’t a big seller of Uniregistry names. It’s one of Uniregistry’s smaller channel partners and the number of Uniregistry names it’s sold — measured in the thousands — is a drop in the ocean of the over 55 million gTLD names it currently has under management.
The two companies are also competitors, it probably should be noted.
But while Uniregistry’s registrar seems to be have been well-received by customers, and its domain volume has grown rapidly in the last three years, it still only had about 1.5 million domains under management at the last count; hardly an existential threat to the Scottsdale behemoth.
It should also be noted that GoDaddy is not the only registrar to distance itself from Uniregistry.
NameCheap also recently discontinued support for the TLDs that are experiencing the biggest price increases. Tucows announced a similar move in May.
GoDaddy had already said it would drop Uniregistry once before, but changed its mind, before changing it back again.

GoDaddy CEO to retire at 58

GoDaddy CEO Blake Irving tonight announced his retirement from the company.
Irving, 58, said he will leave the corner office at the end of 2017, and will stick around on its board of directors until June next year.
He will be replaced by current chief operating officer Scott Wagner, who joined the registrar in 2013 from KKR, one of the three investment companies that owned GoDaddy in its interregnum between founder Bob Parsons and its 2013 initial public offering.
“After more than three decades in technology, I’ve decided it’s time to retire and begin the next phase of my life,” Irving said in a press release.
He added that revenue and profits had doubled under his watch, which commenced in 2013.
Wagner served as interim CEO of GoDaddy in 2012, after Parsons protege Warren Adelman’s short stint in the role.
He was also named president of the company last year.
GoDaddy’s share price has dipped slightly in after-hours trading in the hour or so since the announcement was made.

Google dumps Nazi domain in hours

Neo-Nazi blog The Daily Stormer found itself without a registrar for the second time in a day this evening, after Google cancelled its registration.
The company told BBC News:

We are cancelling Daily Stormer’s registration with Google Domains for violating our terms of service.

The cancellation came not many hours after GoDaddy, the controversial site’s original registrar, gave its owners 24 hours to find a new registrar.
That was in response to people on Twitter complaining that the Stormer had published an article attacking a victim of alleged right-wing domestic terrorism, which GoDaddy said broke its terms of service inciting violence.
The current Whois record for dailystormer.com indicates that it is still with Google, but in a clientTransferProhibited status.
That means it should not be possible to transfer the name to a third registrar, unless and until Google changes the status.
The domain still resolves, however, from where I’m sitting.
It might be that the Stormer will now find itself registrar-hopping and/or facing a period of downtime.

GoDaddy kicks out neo-Nazi site after dead protester post

GoDaddy has given neo-Nazi web site The Daily Stormer a day to GTFO after it posted an article viciously attacking the victim of racially motivated violence in Charlottesville, Virginia.
In multiple tweets, the company said this morning that it had given the site’s owners 24 hours to move to a new registrar.

We informed The Daily Stormer that they have 24 hours to move the domain to another provider, as they have violated our terms of service.

— GoDaddy (@GoDaddy) August 14, 2017

The tweets came in response to those who questioned why GoDaddy continued to host the site in light of an article posted about Heather Heyer, who was killed while protesting white nationalists at a rally on Saturday.
A man has been arrested and charged with her murder, after allegedly driving his car into a crowd, injuring 19 others.
The article in question was a horribly vicious, cartoonishly misogynistic rant, by site founder Andrew Anglin, entitled “Heather Heyer: Woman Killed in Road Rage Incident was a Fat, Childless 32-Year-Old Slut”.
GoDaddy did not specify which terms of service the Stormer had breached, but its terms do include a prohibition against promoting violence.
The Stormer web site has a disclaimer on it stating it is “opposed to violence” and that it will ban any commentators who promote violence.
Within hours of GoDaddy’s tweets, a post appeared on the site claiming to have been written by notorious hacking collective Anonynous, which claimed the site was now under its control.
The post said that the site would be taken down within 24 hours and that quantities of material on the Stormer and Anglin had been obtained.
At this time it is not clear whether the site has really been hacked or is a hoax carried out by the Stormer itself, perhaps designed to make light of upcoming downtime.
The Daily Stormer’s domain has been hosted with GoDaddy since its launch in 2013.

GoDaddy domains business grows 15% in Q2

GoDaddy saw its revenue from domain name sales increase by almost 15% in the second quarter, the company announced this week.
Its domains revenue was $263.3 million, up 14.6% on the same quarter last year.
That was part of an overall growth trend at the company, which saw revenue for the quarter up 22.3% at $557.8 million.
Revenue growth would have been a point higher but for currency fluctuations. GoDaddy now does about a third of its business outside its native US, helped a deal by its acquisition of Host Europe Group, which closed at the start of the quarter.
Net income for the period was $18.1 million, reversing a loss of $11.1 million a year ago.
Domains account for about 47% of overall revenue at the company.
GoDaddy said it had 17 million customers at the end of the quarter, June 30, adding about a million organically compared to a year earlier and 1.6 million from the HEG acquisition.
At the end of the quarter, the company had $591.2 million in cash and equivalents and debt of $3 billion.

GoDaddy flips hosting business for $456 million

GoDaddy has sold off its recently acquired PlusServer business for €397 million ($456 million).
The buyer is a private equity firm, BC Partners.
The registrar had taken control of the business when it spent $1.79 billion on Host Europe Group earlier this year, but had said from the start that the asset was for sale.
PlusServer sells hosting to larger companies, which have more demanding support needs that small-business-focused GoDaddy is accustomed to dealing with.
The unit was bringing in annual revenue approaching $100 million per year.
GoDaddy said it planned to put the proceeds of the flip towards paying off some loans.

GoDaddy launches security service after Sucuri acquisition

GoDaddy has revealed the first fruits of its March acquisition of web security service provider Sucuri.
It’s GoDaddy Website Security, what appears to be a budget version of the services Sucuri already offers on a standalone basis.
For $6.99 per month ($83.88/year), the service monitors your web site for malware and removes it upon request. It also keeps tabs on major blacklists to make sure you’re not being blocked by Google, Norton or McAfee.
This low-end offering gets you a 12-hour response time for the cleanup component. You can up that to 30 minutes by taking out the $299.99 per year plan.
The more expensive plan also includes DDoS protection, a malware firewall and integration with a content delivery network for performance.
There’s also an intermediate, $19.99-per-month ($239.88/year) plan that includes the extra features but keeps the response time at 12 hours.
An SSL certificate is included in the two more-expensive packages.
The pricing and feature set looks to compare reasonably well with Sucuri’s standalone products, which start at $16.66 a month and offer response times as fast as four hours.
As somebody who has suffered from three major security problems on GoDaddy over the last decade or so, and found GoDaddy’s response abysmal on all three occasions (despite my generally positive views of its customer service), the new service is a somewhat tempting proposition.

Bladel quits as Council chair as GoDaddy ruled “ineligible” for election

GNSO Council Chair James Bladel has resigned, after it emerged that GoDaddy, his employer, is not eligible for office under registrar rules.
He will continue to occupy the post on an interim basis until a new election is held.
Bladel was elected to represent the Registrars Stakeholder Group on the Council back in 2013 and was elected by the Council as chair in late 2015.
However, the RrSG has just discovered that he’s actually ineligible for elected office under its charter because GoDaddy is also a dot-brand registry.
The RrSG charter states that in order to avoid conflicts of interest, a registrar that also has a Specification 9 exemption from the registry Code of Conduct in an ICANN registry conduct may not hold office.
GoDaddy signed its .godaddy registry agreement, which includes the Spec 9 exemption, in July 2015. The gTLD is not currently being used.
GoDaddy is of course the largest registrar in the industry, but it appears its ability to wield power in ICANN’s policy-making bodies now appears to be hamstrung by its foray into new gTLDs.
Bladel’s resignation is not expected to have any significant impact on GNSO Council work.
He’s been reappointed by the RrSG executive committee on an interim basis until elections can be held for a replacement. His term is due to expire in November anyway.

Schilling expects GoDaddy to return after dumping Uniregistry gTLDs

Uniregistry CEO Frank Schilling has expressed his “surprise” that GoDaddy has decided to stop selling his company’s gTLDs, but said he expects the registrar to return in future.
GoDaddy’s decision to stop new registrations and inbound transfers for Uniregistry’s portfolio of gTLDs came after the registry revealed price increases for 16 strings that ranged from nominal to over 3,000%.
The registrar told Domain Name Wire yesterday that Uniregistry’s move presented “an extremely poor customer experience” and “does not reflect well on the domain name industry”.
Registrars are of course the customer-facing end of the domain name industry, and the burden of explaining renewal price increases of 5x falls on their shoulders.
But Schilling seems to expect the ban to be temporary.
“We are extremely surprised by GoDaddy’s reaction but are pleased that our extensions are available at many other registrars who support our approach. We remain ready to support GoDaddy when they decide on a path which works for their customers,” he told DI today.
“We expect them to return,” he added.
It’s a plausible prediction. GoDaddy’s statement to DNW said Uniregistry had been cut off “until we can assess the impact on our current and potential customers”, which suggests it’s not necessarily permanent.
GoDaddy is Uniregistry’s first or second-largest registrar in most of the affected gTLDs.
But because the gTLDs in question have so few domains in them, the number of GoDaddy-sponsored domains is typically under 1,000 per gTLD.
Even in the much larger zones of .click and .link (which are receiving small price increases and will still wholesale for under $10), GoDaddy’s exposure is just a few thousand domains and it’s nowhere near the market leader.
I wonder how much of GoDaddy’s decision to drop Uniregistry has to do with the reaction from domain investors.
Ever since DI broke the news of the price increases a week ago, there’s been a stream of angry domainer blog and forum posts, condemning Schilling and Uniregistry for the decision and using the move as a stick to batter the whole new gTLD program.
For registrars, it doesn’t necessarily strike me a terrible deal.
While they will have to deal with customer fallout, over the longer term higher wholesale prices means bigger margins.
Registrars are already adding about a hundred bucks to the $300 cost of a .game domain, and the price increase from $10 to $300 of the Spanish equivalent, .juegos, likely means similar margins there too.

GoDaddy Super Bowl ad results “best ever”

GoDaddy said its Super Bowl commercial, which aired yesterday, resulted in its “best ever” Sunday for new customers.
The company said in a press release it had seen its “its best-ever Sunday for attracting new customers in the books”.
That doesn’t necessarily mean it sold more domains than its previous Super Bowl efforts, nor that it made more money.
It seems the web site builder service GoCentral, which is currently offered with a free trial period, accounted for “about half” of these new customers.
GoCentral was the subject of the ad, in which the abstract concept of “The Internet” is embodied as an irritating hipster. It can be viewed here: