Registrars Still Ignoring ICANN Rules 122
stry_cat writes "Over a year ago ICANN moved to clean up misbehaving registrars like GoDaddy. They released this scary sounding advisory. However, over a year later, problems remain. One company is now publicly complaining. Some of the biggest registrars are slammed for their actions. 'Register.com is one frustrating company. The ICANN policy clearly prohibits blocking a transfer of a domain name that has expired but not yet been deleted. Despite that, a customer trying to transfer a three-day-expired Register.com domain name told us last week that they refused to give him the necessary code to allow him to transfer — unless he pays them to renew it first. ... GoDaddy (and their reseller arm, Wild West Domains) have a different problem: They still block transfers for 60 days after a registrant's contact update, even after the ICANN update specifically prohibited doing so. They freely admit it, too. ... We see a similar problem with many transfers from Network Solutions.'"
Re:Try this: Don't get suckered in my the marketin (Score:3, Informative)
I tried to order a domain from GoDaddy once, after clicking through six pages of crap addons at checkout I decided the marginal savings wasn't worth it and moved to NameCheap.
Ignoring The Elephant In the Room (Score:5, Informative)
There is a reason why your favorite evil spamming domain has bad registration data, and there is a reason why it will stay that way.
Re:Try this: Don't get suckered in my the marketin (Score:4, Informative)
The cheapest legit Registrars I've found were just over $10. The ones cheaper than that don't offer any privacy.
I'd never use a registrar like GoDaddy. Their privacy is totally fake - anyone can phone in and get your info.
Re:Try this: Don't get suckered in my the marketin (Score:3, Informative)
And as economics tells us, as a market approaches 'perfection', profit margins approach 0%.
Economic (supernormal) profit approaches zero.
Normal profits are the opportunity cost of your time/money/labor/etc.
Since they are considered a cost, normal profits are maintained even in a perfect market at equilibrium.
[/nitpick]
Re:Internet Domains are under free market purview (Score:5, Informative)
Piss them off anyway. GoDaddy is a bunch of leaches on the face of the Internet. Although I've never used GoDaddy for providing domain names (I'm very picky about who I trust with something that important), I tried using them for hosting and SSL certs recently. My GoDaddy experience was so bad that I actually wrote my first Slashdot journal entry about it. The gory details are chronicled here [slashdot.org].
Godaddy is absolutely the most inept company I have ever dealt with; they make Fry's employees look knowledgeable, caring, and competent. They make Brooklyn camera shops seem above board. They sell services, then back out of the deal, screw up the refund afterwards, oversell their shared hosting servers, don't monitor what people do with them (allowing a few customers to cause multi-minute site outages), don't respond to customer complaints other than suggesting ways for you to pay them more money, require you to do things that defy the laws of physics in order for them to pay attention to your complaints... basically, they have single-handedly changed what the "S" stands for in ISP. They are to ISPs what the BOFH is to a proper IT manager.
I think it would be absolutely AWESOME if ICANN revoked their registrar status. It's not Chapter 7, but it would be a good start.