GoDaddy Holds Domains Hostage

saikou writes "There were previous reports of GoDaddy, one of the biggest domain name registrars, attacking Bittorrent sites with frivolous interpretation of their own Terms of Service (that story was resolved), and now similar events unfold with clients of one of Russian domain registrars Majordomo.ru -- GoDaddy has informed them that all 1399 client domains are now blocked (story in Russian) due to 'many of your domain names were listed in the Spamhaus.org blacklist or were resolving to a name server or IP address listed in the Spamhaus.org blacklist' with a demand of a neat '$199 non-refundable administration fee to the credit card on file for your account for each domain name you wish to reactivate' or $50 for each domain to be transferred out into another registrar. I am all for fighting spam, but given how unreliable spam black-lists are such actions simply damage the internet. Instead of affecting people that use spam lists to control the inflow of mail to some degree, all users are effectively forced to be black-list clients. Now all one needs to shut down a site is a few reports of spamming, and the domain (or even better, all domains of a given small registrar) will be suspended."

a company selling $2 domain names is shady!!!

[a_greer2005]

Whats next, are you going to tell me that used car dealers can be less than fully honest? SAY IT AINT SO!

Not surprised...

[__aaclcg7560]

Seriously, an outfit named "GoDaddy" was bound to say, "Who's your daddy?!"

Damn it!

[Anonymous Coward]

When is someone going to start running summaries through a spelling and grammar checker or even rewriting them because reading things without commas and necessary punctuation along with incredibly long sentences is extremely hard you know and this particular summary is even more confusing now because we can't tell what the submitter even meant but hey CowboyNeal just always does some copy&paste stuff without caring about the audience right and it isn't important at all if TFA is in Russian and the letter unreadably formatted.

WTF?

[Some guy named Chris]

Sometimes you read the article description, and actually know less than when you started.

This is one of those times.

Re:Odd.

[bigman2003]

Sorry you don't like their advertising.

Personally, I use GoDaddy for a domain registrar, and a host in some cases.

The only reason I started was because of their commercials. A tech company willing to have totally gratuitous shots of a chick bouncing her big boobs...well, that's a company for me.

Really- I did move a lot of business there because of the chick with big boobs. I guess that makes me shallow. Or a guy who likes boobs.

You Go Daddy!

Well...

[mrlsd]

GoDaddy has to pay for all those Microsoft licences somehow...

Re:Damn it!

[Zantetsuken]

because if they souped up the form for people to submit stuff to have a spell and grammar checker, people would complain it takes anywhere from a half second on their dsl or cable modem to 2 seconds longer on dialup - and if it wasnt that, they'd complain about whatever script for it not working in Safari, Opera, etc, for that matter, it'd probably be an IE only compatible script, and not at all standards compliant...

I abhor the IRS, but would still say yes

[Mostly a lurker]

Are you saying that the worst murderous mobsters can operate massive criminal enterprises on a website hosted in an anarchistic country and their registrar should be prevented from denying them service?

Some people may have valid reasons to access government sites.

Re:"Hostage" is just the right word

[tomhudson]

... well, seeing as its "reactivation fees charged to the credit card on account" ... and that the REAL spammers probably used stolen cc info, they'll be going "no problem, comradeski, here's our NEW credit card info, charge away ... heck, charge it twice, you know, one for "next time", dah?".

Of course, the non-spammers end up with a kick in the head.

This isn't going to stop real spammers - they've got millions of windows slaves.

Could be interesting

[bobamu]

after all, they claim they are targeting "russian spammers".

and now they are trying to extort money from them.

I find potential scenario amusing.

Re:Shows what you know

[SillyNickName4me]

And iven the number and frequency of security holes found in sendmail, maybe some people have just made an executive decision to not accept mail coming from sendmail sites. Guess what? I'm one of them

Anybody who's silly enough to run sendmail in this day and age, given the alternatives, is either on crack, or so self-centered that they don't give a shit about anybody else. In my opinion, that in and of itself is enough of an indication of incompetence that I just won't bother with them.

1996 called, they want their sendmail complaints back.

Digg

[wbren]

Well, here's a story you won't see on Diggnation.

"This week's episode of Diggnation is brought to you by GoDaddy -- The people who are probably holding your domain hostage right now."