PR Nightmare Over Domain Suspension — GoDaddy Faces

GoDaddy abrubtly suspends registration.

GoDaddy chief Bob Parsons is a big supporter of free speech. He’s also a big supporter of privacy as a way to do this by promoting domain whois privacy services.

That’s why the internet world was shocked today to learn that GoDaddy suspended a domain name, seclists.org, based on the content on that site. MySpace contacted GoDaddy to suspend the registration since the site had information regarding MySpace users counting their usernames and passwords. GoDaddy complied.

See Seclists.org’s explanation of what happened here.

To make matters worse, GoDaddy general counsel Christine Jones responded by saying GoDaddy’s terms of service say the firm “reserves the right to terminate your access to the services at any time, without notice, for any reason whatsoever”, as stated by the CNET article.

That attitude ought to make people think twice regarding registering domains with the firm. I suspect that, although its in the terms and conditions, it’s not GoDaddy’s policy to terminate access to services for any reason.

What is a registrar’s role in enforcing the law? This is a topic of much debate. In July eNom came under pressure since one of its resellers registered a domain on behalf of a terrorist organization. Last year an organization tried to get a court order to force ICANN to suspend the registration of Spamhaus, an anti-spam site. Domain registars are also coming under fire to track registrations of typo domains that might be used for phishing attacks.

Generally speaking, a domain registrar supplies the domain but the content is hosted with the webhost. A webhost ought to be responsible for complying with requests to remove copyrighted content and remove sites that violate the law. In this case, MySpace probably contact GoDaddy since it’s a sizable firm. Webhosts are often modest and difficult to contact.

You can rest assured that Bob Parsons will blog regarding this issue. He has some explaining to do.