ISP GoDaddy become the Internet's largest domain registrar through strong pricing, customer service, and sexy Super Bowl commercials. I use them. It's time to reconsider after this chilling story about their anti-customer attitude.

A list of MySpace usernames and passwords has been passed around the Internet the last few weeks. One place it showed up is a mailing list archive stored by Seclists.org. MySpace didn't contact the Seclists.org domain owner to remove it. Instead they went to GoDaddy, the registrar, to complain. GoDaddy promptly turned off the domain.

In a news.com investigation, Seclists.org owner Fyodor Vaskovich provided evidence that GoDaddy's notification consisted of a voice mail that the domain was suspended with no explanation. The domain was turned off 52 seconds later. It took several hours for the domain to be restored after he spent hours on the phone with GoDaddy.

A web site with 250,000 pages vanished from the Internet because of one questionable page. With essentially no notice, no chance for the customer to explain or act, no request to remove the offending page, no subpoena, no court order, and no legal risk to GoDaddy.

GoDaddy put their customer out of business based on the unsubstantiated word of a third party. All because of one page. That's one warped view of customer appreciation.

This is inexcusable. It could just as easily happen to you, whether it's a personal web domain or a major corporate e-commerce web site. Instead of protecting its customer and his free speech and giving him a chance to defend himself, GoDaddy rolled over with a simple request from another big company.

To make the matter worse, GoDaddy has shown a disturbing insensitivity to the gravity of the situation, the abandonment of their customer, and the devastation caused by their action. GoDaddy general counsel Christine Jones retreated to GoDaddy's dictatorial Terms of Service that say they can do whatever they want with customer accounts. She graciously added "I think the fact that we gave him notice at all was pretty generous."