GoDaddy Continues to Suffer for SOPA Support

GoDaddy is not having a merry Christmas, and the way things have started out this week, its New Year's celebration will be punctuated with audible sobbing. A lot has happened to the company since last Friday. The first notable thing, according to VentureBeat, is that it has lost 37,000 domains - mostly the result of boycott efforts after the company was revealed on a list of companies that support SOPA. The company said last week in a very public statement that it no longer supported SOPA, but this week it was revealed that much of that was simply damage control to stop the exodus of customers. The truth is the company still supports SOPA. Here's an excerpt from a TechCrunch story pointed out by a Reddit user:

"[GoDaddy CEO] Adelman couldn’t commit to changing its position on the record in Congress when asked about that, but said 'I’ll take that back to our legislative guys, but I agree that’s an important step.' But when pressed, he said 'We’re going to step back and let others take leadership roles.' He felt that the public statement removing their support would be sufficient for now, though further steps would be considered."

To add even more fuel to the fire, a competing company called Namecheap is going after GoDaddy's customers by publishing its own stance on SOPA. Richard Kirkendall, Namecheap CEO, made the following statement last week:

"While we at Namecheap firmly believe in intellectual rights, SOPA is like detonating a nuclear bomb on the internet when only a surgical strike is necessary. This legislation has the potential to harm the way everyone uses the Internet and to undermine the system itself. At Namecheap, we believe having a free and open Internet is the only option that will continue the legacy of innovation and openness that stands for everything we all value in our modern society."

Namecheap also claims GoDaddy is not transferring the domains of those customers who have left their service, an accusation the company claims is not true. Some customers have said that they are "stuck in limbo" while they wait for GoDaddy to transfer their domains to new services, but GoDaddy says that companies such as Namecheap have not contacted them about the transfers - which is typically the way this sort of thing works when you move your web presence elsewhere.

Finally, Boing Boing points out the plight of David Rusenko, co-founder of website hosting service Weebly.com. He describes how GoDaddy wiped his domain name records after only one complaint. The point of their story is that even before something like SOPA is in place, the company bends over backwards to listen to a complaint from an outside source and treats a customer badly:

"They had received a complaint about the content of a site, and that they were removing the DNS entries for weebly.com because of it. I asked him if they had contacted us previously -- he responded that they hadn't. The site in question featured a bad review of a local business, and that business had complained."

Rusenko immediately removed the domain from GoDaddy to prevent something like that from happening again.