Namecheap Accuses Godaddy Of Blocking Domain Transfers
A few days ago thousands of customers turned against domain registrar GoDaddy for their support of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).
Transfer requests for thousands of domains were started, and even big players such as Wikipedia threatened to move.
In a response, GoDaddy was quick to drop their support for SOPA (but not really), and the company kindly asked customers to come back.
Many customers were nevertheless determined to move to another registrar, but that presented a new problem.
It turns out that GoDaddy is delaying a significant number of the domain transfers for reasons unknown. GoDaddy competitor Namecheap suggests that the transfers are blocked on purpose.
"As many customers have recently complained of transfer issues, we suspect that this competitor is thwarting efforts to transfer domains away from them. Specifically, GoDaddy appears to be returning incomplete WHOIS information to Namecheap, delaying the transfer process. This practice is against ICANN rules," they write.
"We at Namecheap believe that this action speaks volumes about the impact that informed customers are having on GoDaddy's business. It's a shame that GoDaddy feels they have to block their (former) customers from voting with their dollars. We can only guess that at GoDaddy, desperate times call for desperate measures."
Other GoDaddy competitors such as DNSimple are more reserved in their response, but also state that the delay is unusual.
"We've definitely seen a lot more of these messages since the SOPA announcement just before Christmas. Prior to that I almost never saw domains stalled because of problems getting at whois data. Whether GoDaddy is doing it on purpose or if they are just overwhelmed with the number of domains that are being transferred out is pure speculation at this point," Hacker News writes.
GoDaddy has yet to response to the unusual transfer delays, but their image has yet again suffered a blow.
update: godaddy responds
Namecheap posted their accusations in a blog, but to the best our of knowledge, has yet to contact Go Daddy directly, which would be common practice for situations like this. Normally, the fellow registrar would make a request for us to remove the normal rate limiting block which is a standard practice used by Go Daddy, and many other registrars, to rate limit Whois queries to combat WhoIs abuse.
Because some registrars (and other data gathering, analyzing and reporting entities) have legitimate need for heavy port 43 access, we routinely grant requests for expanded access per an SOP we've had in place for many years. Should we make contact with Namecheap, and learn they need similar access, we would treat that request similarly.
As a side note, we have seen some nefarious activity this weekend which came from non-registrar sources. But, that is not unusual for a holiday weekend, nor would it cause legitimate requests to be rejected. Nevertheless, we have now proactively removed the rate limit for Namecheap, as a courtesy, but it is important to point out, there still may be back-end IP addresses affiliated with Namecheap of which we are unaware. For complete resolution, we should be talking to each other - an effort we are initiating since they have not done so themselves.
-Rich Merdinger
Sr. Director of Product Development - Domains
Go Daddy
This post was previously published on torrentfreak.com and originally appeared here. The text above is published under a Creative Commons Attribution License
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