26 Jan '07 - 288 W - + 5 - 6 Goodbye GoDaddy
So for the past number of years I have used GoDaddy as a registrar for this domain. Why? Because it's cheap (though now there are many competitive registrars) and has offered good enough service to suit my purposes.
Well, no longer - though I always knew that GoDaddy was a little suspect (the
founder maintains a blog where he occasionally regurgitates rightist propaganda), I never thought they were downright spineless. That is,
until now:
MySpace asked GoDaddy to pull the plug on Seclists.org, a site run by Fyodor Vaskovich, the father of nmap. The site hosts a quarter million pages of mailing-list archives and the like. MySpace did not obtain a court order or, apparently, compose a DMCA takedown notice: it simply asked GoDaddy to remove a site that happened to archive a list of thousands of MySpace usernames and passwords, and GoDaddy complied. Fyodor says the takedown happened without prior notice.
When asked about their general policy for this sort of thing, GoDaddy responded that it's a "case-by-case basis" - or in other words, if it's a big nasty corporation they'll give in immediately.
Well, I just switched my registrar for this domain (it was up for renewal in March anyway). I'm now using ZoneEdit as both a registrar and DNS server management service, and yeah. It really doesn't matter much, it's only $8-9/year that GoDaddy is missing out (and it won't affect you, the reader, in the least - the site will still be here, same as always, with the same url), but I still feel better for not supporting such a spineless company. If you happen to have domains registered through GoDaddy, I encourage you to find yourself a different registrar.