Did VPN actually speak to him or is it BS? - I suspect BS........
I have no reason to believe calling BS on
@VPN.com's Michael Gargiulo is/was warranted. I'm inclined to believe the comment, and that Mr. Gargiulo did in fact speak with Mr. Bhutani regarding this. Though, I know no more than you, and am simply speculating based off of the comment.
As Mr. Gargiulo stated he explicitly did so about this case. Though, the method of communication was not mentioned, and without speculating too much I think it's worth noting that a vast amount of domain related communication occurs behind the scenes (to include private forums).
Here are the details you are looking for. We reached out to Paul and Aman for Brent in
February 2020, as you can see below.
@Paul Nicks, quickly referred me to Justin Redman, who is GoDaddy's Assistant General Counsel. It was GoDaddy's legal team that made the final policy decision to keep the locks in place.
For context, these emails were sent when over $850,000 in our brokered deals for
@create.com Brent Oxley and
@DomainingCom Francois Carrillo were being jeopardized by these locks.
As you will read below, we offered to fully indemnify GoDaddy to protect them from any future liability created from the frivolous litigation if they unlocked the names. After being completely out of options, we even asked for GoDaddy to allow account changes of the domain, internal to GoDaddy, so they still had control. This was also denied by GoDaddy's legal team until the dispute was settled or withdrawn from the Indian court.
I also included the complete documents that were served in Hindi and the official translation that we attached for Aman, Paul, and Justin. No contract with Brent or evidence attached, just a complete rant.
Before we received the English version back from a Hindi legal translator, the domains had already been locked by GoDaddy. Weeks went by without us actually knowing what the documents in Hindi said or why GoDaddy had locked the domains. This part of the process was most troubling. Puneet sent the documents to GoDaddy before Brent was ever served. He knew Brent would be blindsided by GoDaddy's lock (because he has likely done this before).
In fairness to Aman, Paul, Justin, and GoDaddy's legal team they have to manage thousands of different legal situations. Divorces, death, lawsuits, and abusive litigation all factor into GoDaddy's daily role as the largest registry on earth. I do think this was one area where their Terms of Service overstepped and is causing a bad situation to get worse unless the locks are lifted.
Without somehow accounting for frivolous or unsubstantiated claims in the future, GoDaddy's policy decision to keep the locks in place could seriously jeopardize the value of domains across the broader market.
If GoDaddy unlocked the domains and developed an owner-friendly policy change, inspired by Brent's unsubstantiated situation, they could be the hero in all this. The ICA may need to promote additional reform by ICANN.
13 months later and we continue to patiently wait for recognition by GoDaddy of what is going on. I also hope they find a positive solution very soon to mitigate frivolous complaints and future abuses of GoDaddy policies.
Michael Gargiulo
CEO at VPN.com