Go Daddy 'negligent' in handing over ownership of accounts

reckless or intentional conduct is not sufficient ...

to justify the imposition of punitive damages.

Good god, what does GoDaddy have to do? Shoot the legitimate owner?

GoDaddy were going to be my registrar, not any more.

Message to Register forum moderators

I like the new icons but the 'thumbs up' and 'unhappy face' still lack antialiasing around the edges.

This makes my eyelid twitch

Not telling the whole story perhaps?

I've been using GD's services for quite some years now and so far they have never failed me, I'm very pleased with the service and all the extra's which GD provides. And if there's one thing I learned during the past years its that GD takes privacy and security /very/ seriously.

Example: To my knowledge GD is one of the very few SSL certificate provides which invalidated and re-issued /all/ certificates which were created with OpenSSL on Debian (-like) environments when the "debian openssl disaster" struck in 2008. Almost immediately after it became public knowledge...

I think there's more to this story which isn't being told. No way that you can "just" take over another account /unless/ you have insight information to that account. I could imagine that Jeff may have added Ruth as an account executive (gives control over some of your products to someone else) or maybe they shared the login credentials for the account itself.

The reason I suspect something like this is because the GD helpdesk guy didn't so much help Ruth to get control over the domain but over several (all?) products which were registered under Jeff's account. I have done something quite similar recently when taking over several websites of another company. However; in order to do this I still needed to have access to the other account itself.

So I can't help wonder if Ruth didn't have insight information. Either the credentials itself or information such as pincode and such. It wouldn't be the first time that courts make very weird decisions on IT matters simply because they have no clue what is going on.

Bottom line; this has in no way damaged or changed my opinion on GD. IMO still one of the better and more honest registrants out there.

How could they not know?

How could GoDaddy not have known that what they were doing was wrong when they did it? if not malice, they were clearly guilty of reckless indifference to the interests of their customer when they transferred all of their domains to somebody else without bothering to see if the current owner wanted this done or if the person requesting the change had any right to the domains. IMO the punitive damages should have stood to remind GoDaddy, painfully, that what they did was wrong, wrong, wrong, and that it's not a good idea to do it again. I own one, small vanity domain. It's not with GoDaddy and at this point, I'm glad of it.

There's a lesson here for everyone

Never, EVER start a commercial website without being sure you control the domain name. Possession is 90% of the law. Trust me, I've seen this kind of problem too often.

I had one problem with GoDaddy

...a couple of years ago, when I noticed that one of my websites wasn't available. I checked, and I had no trouble accessing anything on the web except my website and the others I was hosting.

So, I tried to log in with SSH - I got "server not found". I wondered if there was anything on GoDaddy's website, but it was inaccessible too - that's often a sign that lots of customers are having trouble - for a while, and when it came up said nothing about any outage.

My websites came back up after a few hours, but I looked in vain for any announcement from GoDaddy. I e-mailed customer service. They responded with some helpful instructions on how to use a web browser, and how to make sure your computer was connected to the internet. I'm not sure how they thought I was going to read it if I was offline.

I tried again, and this time I got through the automated layer to elicit a human response which, basically, denied that any outages ever occur.

I gave up there. The sites were working again, and as far as I know, they've continued to work ever since. I have no plans to change. Sure, their customer service is crap, but whose isn't?

GoDaddy is a disaster . . .

I got on with them when they first started. I had a division of my company in Phoenix and they personally solicited our business. Since they have wiped out our master accounts many times, saying it wasn't their fault. When clearly it was. Two years ago on Halloween, the DNS addresses on over one hundred of our URL's across several account all got reverted to theirs all at the same nanosecond. Once clients started calling telling use their sites were down and we figured out the problem quite quickly, GoDaddy insisted that I changed all of the DNS's. Once the time stamps were pointed out to them, then they said I had a team of hackers scattered all over the world that did it. Please. Needless to say we lost a ton of business that day and at that time I decided to sell my company and get out of the business. I have never been so relieved to get rid of something in my life.

Plus Parsons and his out there opinions, over board obnoxious enforcements and pornesque posts on there site. The guy has surely lost it. I here that the company is up for sale for over 1B, that's BILLION dollars. He won't get that for a fixeruper.