GoDaddy Charges Own Clients with Cybersquatting

Domain name registrar files UDRP complaints for its trademarks. You won’t believe where the domain names are registered.

Domain name registrar GoDaddy.com and its parent firm have filed 4 UDRP cases with World Intellectual Property Organization this year. What’s interesting isn’t that a domain registrar is protecting its brands. It’s that many of the domains it is trying to get are registered at GoDaddy.

Of the four cases, two involve domain names at The Go Daddy Group’s Wild West Domains subsidiary and one is registered at GoDaddy.com.

odady.com – Wild West Domains
websitetonight.net – Wild West Domains
bigdaddyhostingco.com – GoDaddy.com

The last case involves three domain names that are registered at Tucows: gotodaddy.com, gotodaddynot.com, and gotodaddynot.net. These three are part of a long running dispute between DomainsNext.com (perhaps a Tucows reseller) and Go Daddy regarding its trademarks.

DomainsNext set up the latter two web sites as a gripe site to complain that Go Daddy objected to its use of GoToDaddy.com as a web site to offer domain registrations. DomainsNext argues that Go Daddy is overstepping its bounds regarding the use of the term “daddy”: “your effort to have a monopoly and exclusive right to the word daddy is illegal, and defies logic and business practices”.

Sorry DomainsNext. I think it’s entirely reasonable for Go Daddy to claim the rights to a domain name that looks a lot like “GoDaddy.com” offering competing services, and even to put pressure on a domain registrar that has “Daddy” in its name.

DomainsNext ought to be able to keep its bitter gripe sites as they are non-commercial, but GoToDaddy.com ought to be handed over.

As for the first three domains, it will be easy for the registrar to comply with the transfer order 🙂