GoDaddy Follows Google's Lead; No More Registrations In China 243
phantomfive writes "GoDaddy has announced it will no longer register domain names in China, in response to new requirements that each registrant be photographed, and their business ID number be submitted. GoDaddy's representative said, 'The intent of the procedures appeared, to us, to be based on a desire by the Chinese authorities to exercise increased control over the subject matter of domain name registrations by Chinese nationals.'"
Good. (Score:3, Insightful)
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fuck, shit, piss
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Comments about her being hot -- fine, not sexist.
Suggesting she should've been a model? I'm not sure if it's sexist, but seems a bit obnoxious. Maybe she did what she wanted -- followed her passion?
Re:Good. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Good. (Score:5, Insightful)
Is that possible?
Re:Good. (Score:5, Insightful)
perfect the enemy of the good (Score:4, Interesting)
Maximize the localness of your purchases.
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Good luck with that.
As I sit here and consider all that is before me from China, I realize I would have to get rid of:
My LCD picture frame
My lamps
My vacuum cleaner
My stereo
My microwave
My oven
My dishwasher
My speakers
My toaster
My guitar hero controller
My Wii
My TV
My DVD player
My coffee maker
I'll just go ahead and stop there. That is just the stuff I can see without getting up off my couch. If I went through the bedrooms and threw away everything made in China, my house would be half empty.
give up dealextreme? no thanks... (Score:2)
There is no freaking way in hell that I am going to stop shopping on dealextreme.com
no. way.
I hate their ads (Score:2)
And their eye-bleed .NET web site, but I applaud this stand by GoDaddy. They did the right thing and that always speaks louder than really tacky advertising to me.
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If picture IDs for domains were a requirement from the very start of domain name registrations worldwide, it might not have been a big deal. A bit like an Internet driver's license. Now it's too late and as a result, China is seen as controlling. The question is, why does it need to do this? I remember about a year or two ago, all of Google's searches hit .cn domain names. I'm glad that's cleaned-up. Not sure if it was as a result of the picture ID policy.
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I think people are confused on what moderation is for on Slashdot. This isn't digg. Moderation isn't based on whether you agree or disagree with a post. I fail to see how this post is informative in any way, it's just a statement of opinion. That's not to say it should necessarily be modded down, but it definitely shouldn't have been modded Informative. Oh well, hopefully there are still people that meta-moderate.
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Citation, please.
Wow (Score:5, Funny)
GoDaddy did something I like.
Though, it probably has less to do with "Yay Freedom!" than "We can't sell that even with big-breasted women."
Re:Wow (Score:5, Insightful)
Probably has most of all to do with GoDaddy not wanting to figure out the logistics of integrating the new photography/ID requirements into their purchase system.
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My guess is their database has no field for "real name" and they shy away from the cost to rewrite it.
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My brother works at GoDaddy... Amusingly, Anonymusing may be pretty close to the truth, from what I hear about the owner.
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Having dealt with GoDaddy in the past (it took less than a month from setting up the hosting account to me threatening to sue them for breach), I'm pretty certain that the reason has nothing to do with doing right by their customers, so that pretty much leaves the alternatives; when you eliminate the unimaginable, whatever remains must be the case.... :-D
My guess would be that it would take too much effort to add this to their purchasing system. They seem utterly incapable of making even simple changes to
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Tangentially related tirade:
About 6 or so years ago, I had a domain with GoDaddy, and purchasing/managing it was a fairly straightforward process. It dropped after a couple years of use, so I stopped visiting GoDaddy's site. A few months ago, I registered a new domain, which I planned to point to my own DNS servers and maintain full control over.
Dear God.
I had to click "no thanks" to 3-4 screens offering me e-mail hosting, web hosting, "search engine visibility" services, "certified domains" (what the hell
Re:Wow (Score:4, Informative)
Danica Patrick has a bra size of roughly 32B. That's hardly "big breasted" ;-)
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In their defense... when their systems work, they work just fine. It's only when something goes wrong... it goes REALLY wrong, and Tech Support becomes a synonym for Kill Me Now.
I've had worse experiences with BlueHost and 1&1 than I've had with GoDaddy, although that might not be saying much.
Re:Wow (Score:4, Funny)
Working well is not a defense for being evil.
"The Death Star contractors are delivering on time and under budget! Look at the quality of this work!"
Re:Wow (Score:5, Funny)
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You mightn't be enjoying that, but the rest of America likes being anally raped the internet industry.
Re:Wow (Score:4, Informative)
improves their market share in china (Score:2)
I'm sure there are plenty of chinese nationals willing to settle for a domain outside China just to avoid the registration requirements. So they might make more money in China by not being in China.
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I'm inclined to think it's more about freedom. After all, there really isn't anything you can't sell with big-breasted women.
Hey, Me Too! (Score:5, Funny)
Everything is easier when someone else takes the first steps.
Re:Hey, Me Too! (Score:5, Insightful)
It is easy for many companies that deal with web-based work to do this. China is a hotbed of Internet fraud. Although GoDaddy probably makes quite a bit off of domain registrations for .com/.net/etc from China, adding in the photography requirement isn't what will kill their interest. It is the eventual benefit of this requirement that would reduce much of the fraud coming from China (one hopes), and with the reduction of fraud, there are very few legitimate .com/.net/etc registrations from China compared to the US and the rest of the world.
Re:Hey, Me Too! (Score:5, Interesting)
I once worked with a client with subcontractors in China, who would at various times send him mockups and technical drawings for various products. On one particular project, time was getting tight and the subcontractor became strangely non-communicative at a crucial juncture. My client's blood pressure started rising as he kept trying (within the confines of a 10-12 hour timezone difference and a fairly significant language barrier on the telephone) to figure things out and get all the information we needed.
The subcon kept insisting "I sent the files. I sent the files" but he never received them. As a workaround I set up an FTP space where files could be exchanged and we got through our deadlines that way. After the fact, an idea occurred to me and I told my client "hey, why don't you just phone up your ISP and ask them why you're not getting email from China?"
Sure enough, it turned out his ISP had one day decided to just unilaterally stop accepting email from Chinese IP addresses. They did this as a spam and malware control measure, but didn't see fit to inform their customers of the change since they assumed it wouldn't impact anyone in any real way.
Fun times.
Re:Hey, Me Too! (Score:5, Funny)
You'd think they'd start with Nigeria.
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I used to be a systems administrator for a University Mathematics department. This was back before Africa and Russia took over the top spots for Spam production, and China was king. Spam had not yet reached a critical juncture on our e-mail servers, but was becoming a steadily more annoying problem. We had a short meeting to discuss what to do about the matter, and I brought up the various filtering solutions that were becoming more and more necessary. Some suggested that we block e-mail from China. Nee
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It's possible that the volume of registrations would fall low enough that they wouldn't make any money by continuing to do business there.
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pandemic? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:pandemic? (Score:5, Insightful)
Mod this interesting? How the hell is China going to operate in a global economy where more and more business is done over the Internet? The whole point of the filtering is the realization that China cannot compete without allowing access to the Internet, but trying to mitigate the potential delirious effects (to the government and the party) of a fully open Internet. If all it took was just chopping down the copper and fiber at the borders and shutting off access to foreign satellites, without any harmful effects to the Chinese economy, they would have done this fifteen years ago. They don't because they can't, so they have to use the state muscle to try to keep people from seeing dangerous information.
Re:pandemic? (Score:4, Interesting)
Closed trade enclaves to protect the people from the cultural pollution of the Southern Barbarians [wikipedia.org] is an ancient and demonstratively successful strategy in that part of the world.
Anyone with a legitimate business, diplomatic, or other official government-sanctioned need for external access will get it... massively filtered and heavily monitored, and for only a ridiculously small proportion of the population. That way, effective monitoring is feasible. Access will be strictly white-list.
Everyone else gets the Chinese equivalent of AOL, pre-1993. (That's right, not even Usenet.)
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Everyone else gets the Chinese equivalent of AOL, pre-1993
They get floppies in the mail every month?
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Except that, in the end, China's attempts at isolation failed, and failed miserably (ie. the Treaty Ports). China can't afford to just cut off Internet access. Unlike Iran or Burma, who care more about insane amounts of control over the populace than economic growth, China actually wants to be a big player on the world stage, and that means integration into the global trading system. That means dealing with the Internet as it is, not just shutting off all TCP/IP traffic in and out.
And, for the most part,
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> How the hell is China going to operate in a global economy where more and more business is done over the Internet?
Think NAT. Big, big NAT.
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Dangerous = true
The best thing about freedom is that it's CHEAP! --Desmond Tutu
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I don't know. I rather like the delirious interpretation.
Re:pandemic? (Score:5, Funny)
> I think 'deleterious' is the word you were looking for.
Why? "delirious " is a perfectly cromulent word.
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Re:pandemic? (Score:4, Insightful)
For Apple to abandon a supplier practically costs them nothing. There are a hundred more companies eager to step up to the plate and at worst Apple sees a temporary dimple in their supply.
For Google to take a stance that they know shuts out a massive demographic is a much more significant ethical stand.
The two are not even close in terms of sacrifice involved.
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What is their bottom line in China? (Score:4, Interesting)
I have to wonder just how much GoDaddy.com was making from its presence in China. What was its market share? What was its gross revenue?
Based on the opinions of many /. comments, I would have suspected that the two would make happy bedfellows. Doesn't GoDaddy.com practice extreme control over their clients, rooting boxes, and taking over lapsed domain names to then extort their customers, or am I mistaking it for another registrar / host?
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Godaddy likes THEIR extreme control. Allowing others control isn't something that would make them happy.
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Doesn't GoDaddy.com practice extreme control over their clients?
Extreme control over their clients' boobs is more like it.
Not political, just too much work (Score:4, Interesting)
China is imposing requirements that domain registrants must provide a photo and a business ID. That's too much hassle for GoDaddy, home of extreme low-end domain registrations. This has little to do with politics and much to do with GoDaddy's business model.
Re:Not political, just too much work (Score:4, Interesting)
I wonder (Score:5, Funny)
If fu.cn is taken?
Geeze... (Score:5, Funny)
What a bunch of boobs.
.CN domain extensions, not chinese registrations! (Score:5, Informative)
This article summary is fairly misleading, they are no longer registering the .CN extension
Here is some background:
In December, giving 2 days notice to the international registrars, the .CN registry changed their policy to require paper documentation to register a .CN domain name. In January, because the registry didn't plan this very well, and because they gave absolutely no notice, they decided to turn off registrations all together until they could figure out how to actually implement their new policy. The registry implemented their policy without figuring out actually how to implement their policy..
After a month of no registrations, they opened it up, changing their policy once again to only allow .CN registrations for companies not individuals, and only companies that had an office in china. From what i understand, they are trying to remove the stigma of .CN being the #1 fraud extension (before .cm came out that is)
So to be clear, godaddy is no longer doing .CN registrations because .CN is no longer completely automated, which makes it unprofitable with their business model which is primarily based on volume.
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On and one more thing, the Washington post article is WRONG TOO.
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Other than the Post's general issues with content, how is the article wrong?
(Please post citations and sources for your conclusion.)
Note that the article quotes GoDaddy's general counsel as saying "We decided we didn't want to be agents of China."
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On and one more thing, the Washington post article is WRONG TOO.
Thanks for THE INFORMATION.
Me too (Score:2)
I too will stop doing my business in China immediately. The fact I haven't started doing business there is irrelevant. The fact I might start again when nobody is paying attention is also irrelevant. All that matters now is that I grab some headlines and some free advertising ;)
I see a trend here... (Score:2)
...that each registrant be photographed, and their business ID number be submitted...
That doesn't sound too terribly far fetched for a step to be taken by any number of governments including the UK and US.
Hooray for rational behavior (Score:2)
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I totally agree, and it's exactly why I think everyone who was freaking out about Google being "evil" for censoring in China was overreacting. If they leave the country they can't help anybody, but if they stay there they can help shift the balance toward openness, which was pretty obviously what they were doing.
Interesting (Score:2, Interesting)
Actually if you think about it, that Bill would help companies like Google and GoDaddy. Sorry China I can't help you in your quest to find out which of your citizens posted that content! Problem solved thanks to the new Bill.
They still have a stranglehold... (Score:5, Interesting)
This really does not hurt China much.
The western society is a 'servce culture', we exchange value by doing things for one another. The east culture is a manufacture culture. In the UK, our youth look up to playing instruments, video games, being footballers or engineers - doing service related things. In China, education is very important and cut throat. It's more about being a mathmatician, engineer or scientist. In my book about China and Microsoft (Gwanshee), the Chinese can get into university degrees as young as 13!
They are reducing our production capability - they manufacture a large number of things for us so we can do business cheaper. This is a massive stranglehold they have: we benefit because our businesses can do things for less. It's no longer profitable for us to run factories and production workshops in our own territories. This means we become dependent on them, like sucking from a teat.
What do they get from it?
Skills, knowledge, experience to bolster their own country. We get nothing. If we send an Apple engineer to overseer production of an iPod*, who is actually learning how the technology works? Do you think that it's really private from the native factory owners? We're essentially giving them technology and abilities. We have seen them building factories, power stations and transport links that put ours to shame, they are really building themselves an impressive infrastructure. They fund international scholarships to put the skills they learn to good news.
We're digging ourself into a roadblock. What if China cuts us off from manufacturing? It's not as though ALL THE businesses have absolute control, they could not avoid retribution from the government!
We would be screwed. The UK practically builds nothing by itself anymore, we just let China do it. If they stop, we're unemployed and opened for expansion. I think they are grinding us down slowly and surely.
What do you think of China? What can we do about it?
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What if China cuts us off from manufacturing?
Then we will move our manufacturing to other poor countries: Cambodia, Thailand, India, Latvia will all be happy to pick up the slack if China lets off. They all want to learn the skills and technology, too.
China can't conquer by cutting off production of cheap manufactured goods. If they stop producing stuff, yeah, there might be a shortage and deep recession for a number of years (mainly depending on how quickly they stop; remember that if they stop immediately it will really hurt them too, and if it
No it's not. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's old and entirely unoriginal.
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No, you know what is old an entirely unoriginal?
People bitching about things being old and entirely unoriginal.
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Let's all pile onto this pointless thread and chime in about how pointless it is, so that it will take longer to scroll past.
Re:No it's not. (Score:5, Funny)
In metasyntactic Mad-Lib substitution joke, Communist rhetorical cliches build unexpected wooden puns out of YEW!
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The domain "registers" you, doesn't make sense? They are documenting domain owners. Hence, they are "registered." Soviet doesn't make sense, but that helps make the connection.
I actually thought it was kind of funny.
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It does in Soviet Russia, too. Just got an email from my registrar telling me that registration of new .ru domains, as well as maintenance of existing ones (cancellation, transfer, information update) will require an internal passport, with information in it that matches that submitted to domain registry (Russian passports have current place of permanent residence [wikipedia.org] information in it, which citizens are required to update as they move), starting from April. Checked to see if it's true, and sure enough, it was
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It would be one thing if the US government decided to force democracy down China's throat.
As things stand, that's not even in the ballpark of what's going on
This, my friend, is capitalism. Google's power comes from freedom of information, which is severely limited in China. Similarly, GoDaddy has decided that continuing to operate in China would be just too much hassle.
In my opinion, this is also the right thing to do. China is a big power -- possibly the next superpower. And if they do become at least as p
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What about Hillary Clinton's speeches? </sarcasm>
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Re:inalienable rights (Score:5, Interesting)
am awfully tired of our half assed attempts to export our way of life at all levels only when we see fit. we have supported as many dictators as democracies mostly because dictators are easier to please and get to follow our wishes.
So you see a problem, and that is we aren't consistent in trying to make the world better, and your solution is to stop trying? If we change our policy, why don't we change it instead to be, encourage freedom where we can, deprecate evil wherever it is. We can't change the world alone, but almost everyone should agree that freedom of speech, women's rights, and freedom of self-determination are a good thing.
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* Slavery is evil.
* Keeping women oppressed (voting rights, female circumcision, etc) is very bad.
* We should not murder.
* Freedom of speech is a good thing.
See? I have no problem asserting these things, and saying that if you disagree, you are dumb. These are moral judgements, true, but some moral judgements are really basic.
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However, if you like to discuss philosophy, I'll give my view on it:
There is no natural reason that slavery is bad. It is entirely our opinion, our own judgement. Even if you want
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I used to be really annoyed that the US has worked with so many kings and dictators, but then I realized the truth: 60 years ago, there was no one else really to do business with.
The US government has repeatedly overthrown democratically elected (usually socialist) governments and installed capitalist friendly dictators.
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Re:inalienable rights (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh, we've done it many times in South America. Pinochet comes to mind immediately.
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Yeah, the cold-war didn't really bring out the best in the US, or Europe, or the USSR, or China, etc. At least nobody got nuked (sorry Japan).
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Wait, I am confused.
Is your contention that:
1) Countries should be free to choose their own path, or is it
2) Countries should not be free to choose the path of shoving their worldview down everyone's throat
Because you can't have both.
Furthermore, even if we accept that what China is doing is legitimate in terms of "choosing their own path" (rather than a case of
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Re:inalienable rights (Score:4, Insightful)
can't we just let countries choose their own path?
Can't China just let its citizens choose their own path?
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Well, letting an entire country choose its own path sounds good.
Letting a very small % choose the path for a really large country has some problems with it. I mean do the citizens even know about Tiananmen Square? If my country was hiding something that recent and that huge from me I would hope somebody on the outside might put some pressure on them.
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Flame me but can't we just let individuals choose their own path? There is no reason the Chinese government needs to force their world view down their citizens' throats.
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we need to take the growing chinese threat to america a lot more seriously than we have in the past. huzzah to google and godaddy for "getting it"
So much of history was driven by fear.
I must ask, what exactly are they threatening? Your life? Your freedom? The food on your child's plate? The TV sitting in your living room? The car sitting in your neighbor's driveway? What are they threatening to take away from you or your neighbor? What are they preventing you from having? Who is really threatening you? Is it the chinese farmer in a small village with no access to a city, or the government of China? It's obvious that you fear something, but
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My fear is based on some fundamental differences in perceived human rights combined with the worlds largest military.
I propose we push for an increase in there citizens freedoms while increasing trade with China till a point is reached where our economies are so interlocked that nobody would even consider a war as a possible solution to any possible future problems.
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then saying a photo and an ID for a domain registration is too much to stand for the sake of freedome?
Yeah, that's right, requiring a photograph of the registrant is too much. Sure, a lot of scam sites are registered with Chinese domain names. If you think the Chinese government requires photographs and business IDs for the purpose of reducing the number of scam sites, then you're being naive. The government wants that information to stop political speech it doesn't like, it has nothing to do with scam sites. So, yeah, it's a reduction in freedom to make those requirements. It should also be fairly app