Go Daddy Says China Refusal Is No PR Stunt
- By Ryan Singel
- March 25, 2010 |
- 4:00 pm |
- Categories: Commerce
Go Daddy, the net’s largest domain registrar, is infamous for its Super Bowl ads featuring busty models testifying at a fake congressional hearings, but when the company’s top lawyer testified at a real hearing Wednesday about the company’s decision to stop selling .cn domain names, it wasn’t a publicity stunt.
At least not according to Christine Jones, who announced the company’s decision to stop reselling Chinese top-level domain names at a meeting of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China.
“We were having to contact Chinese users to ask for their personal information and begrudgingly give it to Chinese authorities,” Jones told Congress. “We decided we didn’t want to become an agent of the Chinese government.”
“It would be very difficult to say we don’t track publicity at Go Daddy because we do,” Jones told Wired.com on Thursday. “This is not the Go Daddy PR machine cranking up. You can point fingers at us around the Super Bowl, but not here.”
Go Daddy has been selling .cn domain names since 2005, but in December, the Chinese authority that controls its country-code top-level domain announced it would begin requiring that new domain holders provide a photo, their Chinese business license number and Chinese ID numbers. That’s in addition to the usual name, address and phone number required by most top-level domain authorities.
That made Go Daddy uncomfortable, according to Jones. But when the authority required that it collect that same information on pre-existing domain name holders and forward that to Chinese authorities, Go Daddy decided it would stop selling the .cn domain names.
The top-level domain (TLD) .cn is one of the most popular in the world — signifying that a company has a real presence in China. But, it’s not a big business for Go Daddy, which has only registered some 27,000 names from about 1,200 unique individuals.
At $30 a year for a domain name, that equals about $800,000 in registration fees annually. That’s a tidy sum of cash, but not a big chunk of the company’s income given they recorded $750 million in revenue in 2009. The company is the registrar of record for more than 40 million domain names, and has a large business hosting websites and selling SSL certificates.
By contrast, Google is estimated to pull in about $500 million in revenue annually in China, and makes more than $20 billion a year globally in revenue from its tiny text ads.
When Go Daddy informed the previous registrants, some protested the new requirements — while others simply ignored the request, according to Jones. Those who ignore the request could have their domain-name registrations deleted.
The company then decided it would stop selling the .cn domain names — while continuing to administering the existing ones.
Jones says the company made that decision well before Google decided on Monday to redirect traffic from its censored Google.cn address to its uncensored search site based in Hong Kong. (Hong Kong has technically been a part of China since 1997, but as a Special Administrative Region, it remains largely independent and immune to Mainland China’s strict press and censorship regime.)
As for accusations that it was simply jumping on the publicity that Google’s decision received, Jones says the company made the decision independently.
“I wish we had,” Jones said jokingly. “We were trying to find a way not to send the information and trying to find out how can we get around it, but we couldn’t find a way. So we just said, ‘We don’t want to be their information collector.’”
Go Daddy does talk regularly with Google about China, Jones said, but “our decision was internal.”
Go Daddy was also a target of the December hacking attacks, which targeted some 20 companies, and led Google to publicly announce it was no longer willing to run a censored search engine in China.
In Go Daddy’s case, websites it hosted experienced denial-of-service attacks that Jones described as “more sophisticated and well-resourced” than the run-of-the-mill attacks it fends off daily.
Jones’ full testimony can be found here (.pdf).
Photo: Go Daddy General Counsel Christine Jones, courtesy Go Daddy
See Also:
- Go Daddy Stops Selling Chinese Domains Over Censorship Concerns
- Christians Bailing on Go Daddy Due to ‘Immoral’ Advertising
- Google Turns Up the China Burner, Microsoft Feels the Heat
- Google Fights China; Will Yahoo and Microsoft Follow?
- Google Hack Attack Was Ultra Sophisticated, New Details Show
- Google Uncensors China Search Engine
does this mean I can get back my domain name they sold to some person in China?
I use a Go Daddy domain and this is one of the reasons why. They are stand up people and don’t sell out their customers to data miners and evidently oppressive governments, hopefully our own as well. Great prices, excellent service but e-mail needs some work.
Rubbish. It’s totally a PR stunt. $800,000 in revenue is a fine price to pay for the “goodwill” they’ll generate by standing up to the Chinese Communists.
Yeah right! You can’t even, call your CEO BOB Parson to explain.. don’t lie and don’t fool people.. gee
Google cares, because china = money. Goog won’t be calling this amount of press, if china isn’t important for them. Opinions: http://bit.ly/google-v-china-epic-battle
I’m on the neutral side here, CN may look like the bad guy here, them doing that ‘anti-freedom of speech’ but I for one, doesn’t believe that google is the type of PRO HUMAN activist company either.
And so, the plot thickens for these two.
Publicity stunt or not if they hold to it and it creates a wave of other companies following suit, then who really cares. Repressive governments rely on the technical expertise of western companies to keep their censorship going. Sure nothing is stopping them from coming up with the hardware/software themselves but it simply will not be as good, and may in fact be technically less feasible to do all on their own.
Holy Crap…why is that lady in the picture, I almost threw up all over my keyboard!!!
With pictures like that China is most certainly glad to have GoDaddy closing shop…I can hear it now.. “And take that women with you!!!”
Bob Parsons is a punk arse beyotcha…China is happy to see him go.
Nearly all registrars that used to register .cn domains stopped about 3 months ago when the rules changed. This has nothing to do with go daddy being the good guys. We stopped registering .cn domain names 3 months ago? Buy from us cause we’re three months better than go daddy.
Godaddy is a scam. no matter what domain you try to get there they claim is taken so they can try to sell it to you for more.
Fuck GoDaddy. They suck ass for everything web related, whether it’s domains or hosting. Purchasing a single domain involves wading through pages of bullshit fine print, badly placed checkboxes and shitty interface.
And the company that regularly runs Superbowl ads with big breasted women expects us to believe it’s not a publicity stunt? They think we’re all retarded.
Go Daddy can’t really stand on the moral high ground. They will happily ignore their own terms and conditions to make a profit.
http://www.boxturtlebulletin.com/2010/03/12/21043
They are, in contravention of their own policies, hosting a hate site run by a terrorist and calling for the murder of named individuals.
TRiG.
God bless you GO DADDY!
It’s about time that someone put INTEGRITY, and
FREEDOM ahead of making money from them COMMUNIST
LIARS and THIEVES! Now, if ALL of us would insist
on buying from ANYWHERE except CHINA. No more
tainted toys. FAKE DRUGS, cheap and shoddy goods of all types.
WALMART being the biggest CO-CONSPIRATOR of them all.
Wake up. Start slow, DO SOMETHING, BUY AMERICAN.
Considering this is GoDaddy, I’m kinda surprised Ms. Jones isn’t in a bikini for the PR shot at the top of the article (even if that might cause Sarge’s head to explode).