question U.S. government asks ICANN to investigate GoDaddy

My personal feeling on all of this is that godaddy has a vested interest to make getting whois information as difficult as possible to obtain. They do not want the average consumer to have this information because it is to their advantage to have everyone buy the domains at godaddy.

It starts with restricting the whois to THEIR website and then they slowly start to throttle it and display only what they see fit, making it more and more difficult for anyone to get to contact information to acquire the domain privately. A 20% commission can be highly motivational when it comes to passing out information to it's competitors.

Godaddy uses the guise of spammers to justify it's new system but the reality of it is that other registrars are doing just fine without going to this length of deception. Imagine if a small registrar did the same, there would be an outcry and that registrar would be put out of business but because this is godaddy everyone looks at it as law.

At what point in time do we stand up to godaddy and say enough is enough... it is my domain and I have to ask permission from godaddy to disply my whois? What a load of bull crap!!

Why don't they just offer Free WHOIS Privacy like other Registrars? Let the domain owners decide when to show/hide their Whois info...

Regards,
DN

Because godaddy is a money making machine and they cannot afford to stop selling whois privacy, its a massive cash cow for them.

So they come up with a middle system to make it more convoluted to get the information for fear that the regular joe may contact someone privately and circumvent their auctions.

The dangerous part here is that godaddy controls it all and we need regulation to control what they are and are not allowed to do.

MapleDots said:

Godaddy uses the guise of spammers to justify it's new system but the reality of it is that other registrars are doing just fine without going to this length of deception. Imagine if a small registrar did the same, there would be an outcry and that registrar would be put out of business but because this is godaddy everyone looks at it as law.

Click to expand...

But since they are by far the biggest registrar, many people are getting spammed because they have domains at GD.

Worse, there are GD customers who receive spam for SEO webdesign within a few days of registering a new domain, and they think it's GD that is selling out their data to spammers (they don't realize that spammers can see the new registrations and mine the whois). Then they go posting on forums and whinning and badmouthing GD for no valid reason.

Also, there have been spammers/scammers pretending to be GD or being endorsed by GD, using their logo, their name in subject line etc, GD even sued spammers recently. Probably as John Doe as they had yet to be identified.

But yeah, spam is really bad these days.

Also, many ccTLDs (.ca as an example) have whois privacy by default and strangely the LEA are not complaining. Funny isn't it ? Of course, there are channels to obtain that information, if you are entitled to know.